; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. I 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



SERMONS 



PREACHED IN 



THE CHURCH OF THE FIRST RELIGIOUS 
SOCIETY IN ROXBURY, 

BY 

GEORGE PUTNAM, 

MINISTER OF THE SOCIETY. 




HOUGHTON, OSGOOD AND COMPANY. 
C&e-EtoercttJe Presa, Cambridge. 

1878. 



hrSS UBftAftT 
[Of CONGREM 



"5XW3 



Copyright, 1878, 
By HOUGHTON, OSGOOD AND COMPANY. 

All rigkts reserved 



RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE '. 
STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED BY 
H. O. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY. 



PREFACE. 



LTHOUGH the author of these sermons 



could never be persuaded to make a selec- 
tion from his manuscripts for the press, and had 
an entire distrust of their value for any other pur- 
pose than his own delivery from the pulpit, yet 
he did not destroy them nor leave any injunction 
upon their use after his death. His representa- 
tives, therefore, feel neither obliged nor disposed 
to disappoint the strong desire of many persons 
to have some permanent, however inadequate, 
memorial of a preacher who so long exercised 
such unusual power in the pulpit, and who was so 
much beloved by so large a circle of personal 
friends. They accordingly offer this selection. 

The. sermons are printed in the order of date 
without any attempt at arrangement. The four 
dated January, i860, will, however, be found to 
constitute a connected series. 

As this is intended largely, perhaps mainly, 
as a memorial volume, it has been thought fitting 
to add as an Appendix three discourses whose 




iv Preface. 

interest is in a great measure personal. They 
are the first and the last productions of a minis- 
try of over forty-five years. The two sermons 
called " Introductory " were preached in July, 
1830, on the first Sunday after the preacher's or- 
dination. The address at the ordination of his 
colleague was delivered in October, 1875, and was 
the only one he ever wrote for the pulpit after 
the stroke of paralysis which closed his active 
career in December, 1872. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 



I. If Thou hadst been here i 

II. I HAVE TRODDEN THE WlNE-PRESS ALONE 1 5 

III. Life a Voyage 26 

IV. Jesus and Solomon 43 

V. Almost and Altogether ... 58 

VI. Tekel . ...... .71 

VII. Christian Manliness — Doing and Stand- 
ing 84 

VIII. Go Quickly 98 

IX. True Religion no 

X. Unitarianism 124 

XI. Infidelity 140 

XII. One Faith .159 

XIII. The Windows towards Jerusalem . 176 

XIV. Oh, that I knew ! 193 

XV. The One Foundation .... 208 

XVI. The Offense of the Cross . . . 223 

XVII. Science and Theology .... 234 

XVIII. Hath God said it? 249 

XIX. Righteousness First 262 



vi Contents. 

XX. Hindrances 278 

XXI, Anthropomorphism .... 293 

XXII. Thou shalt say, No 309 

XXIII. The Miracle of Cana .... 322 

APPENDIX. 

Introductory 1 337 

Introductory II 351 

III. Ordaining Address 361 



I. 



IF THOU HADST BEEN HERE. 



Then said Martha unto Jesus, Lord, if thou hadst been here, my 
brother had not died. — John xi. 21. 



AZARUS of Bethany fell sick. Jesus, the 



often rested Himself under their kindly roof, and 
repaid their hospitality by his presence, was ab- 
sent, tarrying beyond the Jordan. How they 
missed Him then ! At such a time how one craves 
to have the strongest, wisest, holiest friends by to 
lean upon. They may be powerless, but there is 
a feeling of support, security, peace in their mere 
presence. We can imagine the sisters, Mary and 
Martha, as they tended their dying brother in 
those excited solemn hours, when love despairs, 
and the heart sinks within, and the dreadful 
hour of parting draws nigh, saying over and 
over one" to the other, " Oh ! if He were only 
here ! " And when Lazarus had been buried, and 
Martha went out to meet Jesus on his approach, 
her very first words were those of the text, " If 
thou hadst been here, my brother had not died." 
How natural to speak just so ! Those sisters 
had indeed peculiar reason to speak so, for they 
might well expect of Jesus such an interposition 




doubtless had 



1 



2 If Thou hadst been here. 

of healing as cannot be looked for ordinarily in 
the scenes of human anxiety and grief. And yet 
it is very common, when death has come upon a 
beloved one, for the afflicted survivor to think 
and to say, Oh ! if this or that thing had been 
done, or done sooner, if such a person had been 
consulted, or such a course or act had been 
avoided, if, and if, and if, this or that thing had 
been not so but otherwise, the event would have 
been different, and our lost one would have been 
with us yet. Not seldom does the bereaved 
mind find it difficult to divert itself from these 
vain suppositions, and turn in acquiescence to 
right views and the true solace. 

I do not wish to dwell on this first thought of 
the text. It opens a wider view, ^"thou hadst 
been here ! If. It is often remarked casually 
in conversation, " How great a word is that very 
little word if" — and it seems to me there is 
meaning enough in the remark, and serious and 
important enough, to fill up and constitute a 
grave Sabbath day's discourse. If — that word 
expresses the conditionality of all events, all in- 
terests, all results. Everything is conditional. 
There is nothing absolute but God, and those 
abstract, universal principles which proceed di- 
rectly from his attributes. 

Any event, or any state of things which we 
contemplate, is as it is because a million pre- 
ceding events took place as they did, and if any 
one of those preceding events had not occurred, 
the event or state of things now before us would 



If Thou hadst been here. 



3 



have been different, or would not have been at 
all ) 

Not to notice now those circumstances of crea- 
tion and providence which have determined the 
order of nature, the position of continents, the 
configuration of states, the climate, the soil of 
all lands, a slight change in which circumstances 
would have changed the whole face of the world, 
consider, a single moment, how it has been with 
the great nations and dynasties that have shaped 
the history of mankind. 

Where or what would have been the Hebrew 
race, where Jerusalem and all its history, and all 
the influences that have issued thence, had not 
Joseph been prime minister when his father sent 
to Egypt for bread ? Or had not Pharaoh's 
daughter strayed down to the river side just at 
the hour when the infant Moses lay there ready 
to perish in his rush basket ? Or had not David 
in his shepherd days learned to play on the harp 
whereby he found favor with Saul ? Or had not 
a thousand other things occurred just as they did 
and not otherwise. 

Roman history was the world's history for a 
thousand" years, and all subsequent history has 
grown out of it ; but where or what would Rome 
have been if the wolf in the desert had not been 
kind to the infant Romulus, — if that legend be 
true ? 

If the assassin had struck his poniard an inch 
to the right or left, and Henry IV. had lived to 
be old, what would French history have been for 



4 



If Thou hadst been here. 



the last century? Where Louis XIV. and the 
Regency, and the Revolution, and Napoleon, and 
Waterloo, the Europe of this day ? 

If a messenger from Bristol to York had gone 
a little round and gone safe, and William the 
Conqueror had lost one of his battles, where and 
what would have been the England of the last 
few centuries — England and all her great men 
and her institutions and her colonies, these 
American colonies among the rest ? Who can 
tell what events hung on that if? 

If the pilot of the Mayflower had not been 
dishonest or unskillful, where and what would 
have been this our New England ? ) 

All great things depend upon innumerable lit- 
tle things happening just so. A storm at sea, an 
order misunderstood on a battle-field, the slipping 
of a foot, the glancing of a sword, an accident to 
a child, the whisper of a woman, the hissing of a 
goose, the passing of a cloud over the moon, — 
these things, and countless things like them, have 
affected the great events of centuries, the fate of 
nations, the history of the world. At every point 
of time's progress, if this or that slightest possi- 
ble circumstance had been different by a moment 
of time or a hair's breadth of space, the entire 
web of human history, into which our individual 
biographies are all woven, would have been woven 
all differently, — the whole web and each sep- 
arate thread, ours, every man's. 

Whenever we try to run out this infinite chain 
of contingencies, and see how the whole depends 



If Thou hadst been here. 5 

upon each link, and to speculate as to what 
would have been if any single link had been 
wanting or differently placed, we are lost in an 
endless maze of possibilities. It becomes idle 
reverie to pursue it. Only the Omniscient One 
can look it through. And surely He can. His 
providence is over the world. He has not left 
his works to the caprice of chance. He has pre- 
sided over the course of events. He is not dis- 
appointed. He is not taken by surprise at hu- 
man history as it evolves itself link by link in the 
everlasting passage from cause to effect. He 
has known the bearing of every circumstance, 
the least as well as the greatest, from the death 
of a Caesar to the fall of a sparrow, from the 
inundation of a continent to the rounding of a 
dew-drop. This infinite web of affairs passes on 
through the loom of time beneath his all-seeing 
eye. He foresees the end. He has a purpose. 
We grow dizzy in the attempt to follow a single 
thread even a little way. We can but adore and 
trust God. Happy if we can do that. 

Standing on the giddy heights of contempla- 
tion, and sending our glance out over the unfath- 
omable ocean of contingencies, the past, the 
present, the future, we feel as atoms floating in 
immensity ; the brain reels ; we are weak, we are 
ignorant, we are little children of yesterday, our 
boasted faculties falter at the very threshold of 
knowledge ; yet as all the rest give way and leave 
us humble and helpless, one faculty remains, the 
highest and dearest of all, that whereby we can 



6 



If Thou hadst been here. 



fall back into the bosom of infinite intelligence 
and love, and feel the everlasting arm that encir- 
cles all things embracing us also, and can repose 
there and look up and adore with a worship that 
alone makes us great, and pray and trust with a 
faith that alone makes us strong. 

In a narrower field, that of our own personal 
fortunes and character, we are more prone to 
contemplate the tissue of contingencies on which 
our condition has depended and does depend. 
Within this little field there is much which it is 
practicable and legitimate for us to contemplate 
and study out, — not all indeed, only the slightest 
fraction of the whole, yet something. 

Let us point out now some of the directions 
which our thoughts are apt to take in the region 
of contingencies, and see how far and to what 
ends it is well to indulge such thoughts. That 
region covers the Past and the Future. 

I. As to the Past. But I must subdivide this 
general head. 

First, then, from amid misfortunes and sorrows 
and sufferings, from scenes of trial when these 
befall us, from an unhappy position, we look back 
to see the causes, to see how it has come to pass 
so with us, and how it might have been different 
with us, if we had had more foresight or sagacity, 
or other persons had dealt differently by us, or 
Providence had let some event occur otherwise. 
It is natural to indulge such thoughts, and so far 
as we may gather wisdom from the study of such 
past contingencies to guide us in those which 



If Thou hadst been here. J 

shall occur hereafter, it is well to indulge them, 
but not often. Do not do it often. Such 
thoughts soon become morbid, a sickly, fruitless 
brooding./ They breed discontent and gloom. 
They will make you murmur at Providence, and 
make you sour or resentful towards your fellow- 
men, or will turn the sense of your imperfection 
of judgment and forecast into useless vexation 
with yourself, or perhaps into haunting accusa- 
tion of conscience concerning things with which 
the conscience had nothing to do. Accustom 
yourself to such a reverie of ifs, go on to open 
all those contingencies which time has closed, 
and there is no end to the extravagances which 
you may muster whereby to accuse God and man 
and your own shortsightedness. You may in 
imagination restore the fortune that has been 
missed of or lost. You may mount up to the de- 
sired social position which you aspired to, but 
failed to achieve. You may start up whole from 
the bed of sickness or the chair of infirmity and 
pain. You may bring back your dead, your 
child, your parent, your friend, and make com- 
plete again the dear circle of love and happiness. 
You may roll back the dark cloud of adversity, 
disappointment, and grief that a chastening God 
has drawn over you. You may go on thus till 
you have subverted the whole order of Provi- 
dence and nature. But what avails it but to 
make the reality more dark and severe, to deepen 
sorrow into despair and turn patience into re- 
pining. Those are the ifs that beget skepticism 



8 If Thou hadst been here. 

and distrust j harbor them not. The unhappy is- 
sues which God and time have closed, let them 
remain closed. Find in them the good that is 
meant in them, instead of that which you vainly 
desired. Sorrow must look forward, not back- 
ward, for light and solace.) 

Secondly. From amid happy circumstances 
and a prosperous lot we look back upon the con- 
tingencies that issued favorably; and this is a 
better and healthier thing to do than the other. 
It is good to note the things in which Providence 
has been kind to us, for that will awaken relig- 
ious gratitude. And it is not amiss to ask our- 
selves sometimes, What if this or that good event 
had been otherwise ? If you have attained to 
happiness, a satisfying success, think, — - there is 
no harm in that reverie, — think what a narrow 
path you have traveled over, and a precipice on 
either side ; think, if that good mother had not 
by those gentle influences bent my wild disposi- 
tions aright, or if a wise father had not held me 
back from folly by that hand of authority ; if 
those faithful friends had not interposed here 
and there by the way, by word or act, to guide 
and help me ; if this or that misstep, that might 
have borne me down, had not been overruled by 
a happy circumstance ; if a very blessing from 
heaven had not crowned and overcrowned my 
poor and half blind endeavors ; if if ten thou- 
sand ifs come up. No man can number his own, 
much less another's. I see not how the healthy, 
the prosperous, the happy, — how any such man 



If Thou hadst been here. 9 

or woman can look back upon those numberless 
ifs that have turned favorably, and were just as 
likely, so far as they can see, to have turned 
otherwise, and any one of which, turning wrong, 
might have been fatal, — how he can call to 
mind the way in which the good hand of God 
has led him on, how he can think, look upon his 
blessings and think, look back and think, with- 
out turning all his happiness into one fervent 
outflow of thanksgiving to God, and all his mem- 
ories into one collective offering of the heart's 
praise unto the Father of all mercies. 

Thirdly. From amid the sufferings, losses, 
and sharp regrets brought on by sin, the memory 
will sometimes look back through the eye of con- 
science, and finds enough to ponder. The man 
who has blasted his reputation and lost the con- 
fidence of men by base and fraudulent deeds, 
and walks abroad, cowering' or brazen, beneath 
the looks of distrust or contempt that are turned 
to him, degraded and virtually proscribed, — he 
looks back to the time when his good name was 
in his own power, and it lay with him to do right 
or wrong, and he would have been among the 
honored and the trusted — if. What a painful if 
is that ! The wretched inebriate, the blasted de- 
bauchee, in a sober hour of reflection looks back, 
from out his pit of degradation, looks back to 
those moments when his fate was balanced on an 
if — if he had prevailed over that first tempta- 
tion, if he had shunned this bad companion, and 
joined himself to that good and true friend. He 



io If Thou hadst been here. 

thinks what he is, and thinks what he might have 
been, if — that if — once it was poised like a 
delicate balance, and he could have turned it the 
other way with a breath • now the beam has 
gone down and no human power can lift it 
again. 

The convict, in his cell awaiting his just doom. 
Fiercely do his thoughts fly back. He loses him- 
self in visions of the past as in a dream. He 
recalls the turning points in his life's career, — if 
he had listened to that good angel in his breast 
who whispered of better things. If he had with- 
held that first misstep as he might so easily have 
done ; if he had retraced it while yet there was 
time ; if he had curbed that first outbreak of pas- 
sion or that first wandering of lawless desire ; if 
he had listened to that word of loving and wise 
counsel which he listened to and balanced and 
let go ; if he had embraced that opportunity, 
offered him far back, to enter upon an honest 
and virtuous course — f,f,& hundred ifs — and 
as he wakes to the reality of his condition, how 
full of agony they are, those dreadful ifs, they 
mock him like tormenting devils ; once they 
were like yielding air, and he might do as he 
would with them ; now they stand there like bar- 
riers of adamant, inexorable as fate and firm as 
his dungeon walls. 

We all have enough of those moral ifs to look 
at. We think of our misdeeds, our shortcom- 
ings, our neglects, our imperfections, our mani- 
fold sins, and every one of them hung once 



If Thou hadst been here. n 

upon an if every one of them was once a con- 
tingency, any one of them would have turned 
otherwise if — those humbling, remorseful ifs. 
They are too painful, too harrowing to think of 
habitually, but it is profitable to give them some 
earnest thoughts, — enough to provoke a godly 
sorrow, and an effectual repentance, and a firmer, 
wiser will in the coming contingencies. 

II. Our secoiid head was to relate to the future. 
Of this we must make two. 

First. Consider the uncertainty of all our 
plans and hopes. God has made us to look for- 
ward and take thought for the time to come, 
and we do it.) Schemes, prospects, hopes, how 
ingeniously we fashion and adorn them, and set 
them forward before us, arranged in bright ta- 
bleaux on the curtain of the future ! Well, we 
must do it, and it is right. But consider some- 
times on what numberless conditions they all 
depend. Will they be realized? Yes, z/*and if 
again these thousand ifs in the path, any one of 
which may be a gulf that we cannot pass. It 
may come out as we hope, but there is an if at 
every step we take, in every wind that blows, in 
every- fibre of our bodies, in every breath we 
inhale. The life of every one we love passes 
every moment over an if that trembles as a fine 
balance. 1 Our property, our dwelling, our em- 
ployment, our health, our life, — they will remain 
till to-morrow if — . We lie down upon our pil- 
lows and commit ourselves unreservedly to sleep 
and darkness, and shall rise to-morrow if — Oh! 



12 If Thou hadst been here. 

think ! The strong man goes forth to welcome 
his friends to his hospitality, to make merry and 
be glad with him. An unseen hand arrests him 
by the way, and he shall see a friend no more 
with the eye of flesh. The sprightly woman re- 
turns in health and cheerfulness from errands 
of friendship, with quick steps to the duties of 
home ; an invisible power stops her at the thresh- 
old of her dwelling, and she may never pass it 
alive again. Five men in the prime of life and 
vigor sit down around the table to take counsel 
together in midsummer ; before the leaf falls 
four of them are laid in their graves. Behold 
everywhere the tokens of instability and change ; 
see how the flower of the morning withers before 
night-fall ; see how precarious are all the coun- 
sels of man. And look forward. Look at the 
fairest bud of promise and rejoice in it, but per- 
haps a worm lies coiled within it. The sun that 
rises so bright to-day may go down in storms. 
To-day we are strong in prosperity, to-morrow 
may find any man amongst us a beggar. To-day 
we sit rejoicing in the warm circles of love and 
friendship, to-morrow we may be robed for the 
lone and narrow grave. Plan and hope for the 
future, it is God's will, but think if and if the 
ever recurring and ever dubious contingencies ; 
think of them, too, and be humble, be self-dis- 
trustful. Put not your trust in riches ; count not 
on lengthened days ; promise yourself no exemp- 
tion from pain and grief. Trust God and noth- 
ing else. God and not events. God and not 



If Thou hadst been here. 



13 



your own wisdom or strength. Give heed to 
those good, plain words of the Apostle : "Go to 
now, ye that say, To-day or to-morrow we will go 
into such a city, and continue there a year, and 
buy, and sell, and get gain : whereas ye know 
not what shall be on the morrow. For what is 
your life ? It is even as a vapor, that appeareth 
for a little time, and then vanisheth away." 

Secondly and finally. I It is best of all to medi- 
tate upon those contingencies of the future whose 
issues depend upon our own will. There are 
some such, many such, and they are the greatest. 
There are moral decisions to be made at every 
step before us. J The mighty balance of moral 
contingency swings poised at every bend in our 
path, and as we turn it, it is turned unalterable 
forever, for good or for evil immeasurable. 

Behold the child or youth \ what great and 
beautiful possibilities, and what frightful risks 
and perils lie covered up and hidden within that 
young breast. If he shall heed the good voice, 
follow the good impulse, plant himself on the 
true rock, if he will take heed in time, if he will 
choose the right and adhere to it, if he will 
begin now and persevere as duty dictates and 
love pleads, Oh ! happy, happy, blessed forever ! 
or if not, if not, let him look around and see 
what, if not ; let him inquire of his own soul in all 
its coming regret and shame, what if not. Let 
him ask of God's word, what if not. Many things 
in our future depend not on ourselves. God will 
order them as it pleaseth Him, and it shall be 



14 If Thou hadst been here. 

well. But these moral ifs, they are the real 
hinges of our destiny, and our own hands shall 
bend them as we w r ill for our joy or our doom. 
And so long as they are ours to determine, let us 
meditate, let us pray, let us strive, let us resolve 
in the strength of God's grace to bend them 
aright. 
1847- 



II. 



I HAVE TRODDEN THE WINE-PRESS ALONE. 

I have trodden the wine-press alone. — Isaiah lxiii. 3. 

I SHALL take only the sentiment of this text. 
It teaches no doctrine. It declares no great 
principle. It only suggests a thought, and awak- 
ens a feeling. I need not, therefore, study out 
the connections of the passage, or show what it 
strictly means as it stands related to the sublime 
imagery that precedes and follows it in that old 
book of the prophet. The tone of it is my text. 
I will attempt nothing but to echo and prolong 
a little the sound of it, striking so fitly as it does 
upon the ear that is attuned to Sabbath medita- 
tions. 

" I have trodden the wine-press alone." The 
sound of the words is solemn and pensive and 
almost mournful. It lingers on the ear like the 
sigh of a lonely spirit. It comes as a strain from 
the heart's desert places, a voice from the deep 
solitudes of life, where the help and sympathy of 
man cannot reach. It seems to speak of those 
burdens which the human soul must bear alone, 
the dangers it must struggle with alone, and of 
those great crises of existence in which the arm 



1 6 / have trodden the Wine-Press alone. 

of friendship and the heart of love are with- 
drawn or are unavailing. This is the tone of our 
text ; and there is something in every breast that 
vibrates to it, as to a truth that every one finds, 
or will find, in some hours, in some experiences, i 
in some epochs of life, to be a truth to him. 

We are made for society, and we are also made 
for solitude. We are made for the free and com 
fiding converse of our fellow-men, and we are 
made for lonely thoughts and emotions in which 
none living may take part. We are made for 
those ties of life which bind united hearts to- 
gether in mutual helpfulness and make them one 
to do and to bear through love and brotherly 
kindness. And we are made, too, to undergo 
the dissolution of those ties, and for emergencies 
in which the soul can have no earthly partner. 
There are times in which to feel that we are 
everything to one another, and can double our 
blessings by sharing them, and halve our woes 
by breathing and bearing them together, and 
times in which to find that nothing can be done 
for us, and that there are wants of the soul that 
transcend the power of man to supply. There 
are a thousand ways in which God would have 
us feel that we are one for mutual aid, and He has 
ways also to teach us that we are so many sepa- 
rate beings and pass before Him one by one, and 
can lean only upon Him, and have no other stay. 

There are two kinds of loneliness appointed 
for man. The one is a privilege offered, the 
other is a trial imposed. The one is assigned 



/ have trodden the Wine-Press alone. 17 

for the rest and refreshment of the spirit; the 
other for its chastening, to test its faith in God 
and its reliance on things stronger and more en- 
during than an equal's love and care. The first 
is that which Jesus sought on those several oc- 
casions, on which, as we are told, He went apart 
into the mountain, into the desert, into the gar- 
den, apart by. Himself, to meditate and to pray, 
to converse with Himself and with the Father, in 
a higher communion than that of earthly kindred 
and friends. We cannot penetrate the privacy 
of that exalted spirit. But we know the neces- 
sities of our own souls. Every soul of man, if it 
has awakened to a consciousness of itself, if it 
has risen out of the earthiness of its condition 
here, needs its solitary hours. The best thoughts 
that we gain from the speech of men are ma- 
tured, made our own, only by private meditation. 
The highest joys which visit us from God or man, 
though they are given to be shared with others, 
are not felt with a full appreciation, unless the 
heart has had opportunity to ponder them in the 
stillness of its privacy. The best purposes, 
though, it may be, first conceived amid a crowd, 
and to be carried out among men again, want 
maturing and building up in the solitary place of 
contemplation when the mind may clear up its 
moral vision and muster the energies of will by 
itself. There is a good work of self-examina- 
tion that is not assisted but disturbed by any 
human testimony or adjudication. The very 
affections that bind us closest to those we love 
2 



1 8 / have trodden the Wine-Press alone. 

are strengthened and purified by those separate 
hours wherein the heart cherishes only the 
image that is lodged within itself and spreads out 
its treasures only to its own eye and God's. Both 
wisdom and virtue and the good affections, whose 
sphere of exercise and beneficence is the thick- 
peopled world, must derive much of their nour- 
ishment and strength in those silent scenes and 
from amid those secret thoughts with which no 
man intermeddleth. And for those deeper ex- 
periments, and those higher aspirings of the soul, 
for the faith that reaches beyond the dome of the 
material universe to the heaven of heavens and 
the spirit's home ; for the piety that melts in re- 
pentance and rejoices in hope and trusts in God, 
for these the secret place of devotion and medi- 
tation is the nursery that no soul of man can out- 
grow or spare while tabernacled in the flesh. 
The thronged temple of worship and instruction 
has its sacred uses and fitness and its dear sanc- 
tities, and the intercourse of kindred spirits 
traveling one way, and seeking the same end, 
has its edifying power; but the place preemi- 
nently hallowed by Christ's words and his dis- 
ciples' experience in every age is the closet, the 
solitary place where the soul takes account with 
itself and renews its vows, and devotion revives 
its flame, and faith and hope plume anew their 
ever-fainting wings. Personal religion cannot 
dispense with its privilege of voluntary loneliness. 
It cannot live by the breath of others alone. Sym- 
pathy is its mighty helper, but solitude is neces- 



/ have trodden the Wine-Press alone. 19 

sary to its being. No closet, no Christianity. 
So teaches our Lord, and so teaches all the ex- 
perience of his followers. 

But all this is the chosen, the refreshing loneli- 
ness, that is not imposed, but sought by every 
believing and thoughtful mind and feeling heart. 
Our text is pitched to a more sad and serious 
note. It should turn our thoughts to that other 
loneliness that seems more desolate, that in 
which we cannot have companions. " I have 
trodden the wine-press alone." There is many a 
dread and solemn way in which man must walk 
alone, apart from every fellow-creature. Where 
we seem most to need companionship and sympa- 
thy, often we cannot have it. In the exigencies 
in which affection would wish to do most for us, 
it cannot stretch forth its helping hand, cannot 
do anything. In the severest perils there is no 
loving care of a fellow-creature to deliver us. We 
must meet temptation alone, and affliction often 
alone, and death alone, and the judgment alone. 
Give a few moment's thought to each of them. 

Temptation, we must meet, each one, alone. 
Parents have instructed, friends have warned us. 
Many of the wise and kind would guide us, and 
the words and looks and hearts of the loving 
have pleaded with us, that we keep the paths of 
innocence and virtue, rectitude and purity. But 
sin takes us by ourselves and makes its offers to 
us one by one. Every soul must meet the tempter 
face to face, like Jesus in the wilderness, alone. 
No guardian hand can bar out his enchantments, 



20 / have trodden the Wine-Press alone. 

no voice can say for us, Get thee hence. That 
contest must be waged in the secret breast, where 
no allies can interpose to turn away the tide of 
battle. The strength of principle and of will that 
resides in every mind must undergo the fearful 
test of its sufficiency alone. There is no proxy 
admitted in that war. They who, through love, 
would die for us, if they might, cannot save us 
from falling there, though the fall were worse 
than death. We must stand alone behind the 
ramparts of individual conscience. We must 
take the sword of the spirit in our own hand, and 
go forth to that dread encounter alone. Every 
child of man must leave his friends behind while 
he grapples single-handed with his moral adver- 
sary, to stand or fall by the force that is in him. 
Friends may counsel, watch, and pray. But they 
must stand aloof, though we perish. We must 
tread that wine-press alone. 

In affliction we are sometimes alone. There 
are sorrows which no sympathy can avail to as- 
suage. There are some bereavements that seem 
to make the earth a desert. When the nearest 
and best beloved die, all other voices but remind 
us that the voice we desire most is silenced, and 
all other companionship seems null and vain. 
The more our friends gather round us in their 
kindness, the more we feel the inadequacy of all 
remaining things to fill the void, and there is a 
more utter loneliness in society than in solitude. 
And the sight of the eyes is more unsubstantial 
to the heart than the images of memory. He 



/ have trodden the Wine-Press alone. 21 



who amid the vicissitudes of human relations 
does not sometimes feel a loneliness that all the 
world cannot people, has been always alone, and 
has never known the society of the heart. 

In death we are alone. That is a narrow path 
where no two may walk abreast. Though a thou- 
sand should breathe their last breath together, 
there is no fellowship. When that hour comes 
to us, the beloved cannot detain us nor go with 
us. They cannot ward off the stroke nor share 
it. Science and skill may interpose their delays 
and offer their alleviations. Affection will smooth 
the pillow and soothe with new devotion the last 
hours of life ; but when the hour comes, all must 
stand back, and look on in impotence and see us 
launch alone upon the unexplored sea of eternity. 
The little child that had never strayed for an 
hour from the cherishing shelter of the parental 
bosom, must go forth to that untried bourne 
alone. The aged one, that has leaned upon de- 
voted children through every step of the decline, 
must at last drop every staff and pass into the 
shadow of that valley alone. Those who have 
been one by most sacred ties and affections, and 
have stood side by side in every strait and peril 
of the earthly walk, are parted at that brink, nor 
can any more stretch out a hand to one another, 
nor speak a word to guide or cheer, nor so much 
as exchange signals of recognition and remem- 
brance. Shrouded and coffined, alone, the body 
goes to the place of graves, followed yet alone, 
and takes its place in the tomb alone. Reverent 



22 / have trodden the Wine-Press alone. 

and gentle hands may lay us down to rest, but 
they return to the scenes of life and leave us 
there alone. And though we be laid beside the 
dust of kindred, with those we have loved the best, 
there is no communion. " Stay by me," said a dy- 
ing parent to her only child watching by her weary 
bed; "stay by me, will you not, to the last?" 
And he stayed, but soon the closing eye knew 
not his features, and the ear knew not the voice 
that had been the music of its life, and the nerve- 
less hand returned not, nor distinguished the 
pressure of his hand. He was no better than 
a hireling. Not even filial love could add one 
throb to the beating pulse or prolong one mo- 
ment the fleeting breath ; and when the last came, 
though she was his mother and had done so 
much for him, he could do nothing for her but 
give up her dust to the ground alone, and com- 
mend the spirit to its God alone. 

We must appear before God alone — alone in 
judgment ; human love may not interpose there 
to cloak our sins with charity, or take the blame 
of them upon itself, or claim to share the con- 
demnation that may await them. In the great 
concerns of the conscience there can be no part- 
nership here or hereafter. For that harvest every 
man has his own field to sow, fenced off from 
every other ; and what he soweth, that also must 
he reap, — he himself alone. They who have 
watched over us most carefully that the winds 
might not blow on us too rudely, and have la- 
bored for us that we might not labor, and suf- 



/ have trodden the Wine- Press alone. 23 

fered for us that we might not suffer, and made 
it the study of their life to remove or lighten 
every burden that would oppress us, — they, the 
nearest and most devoted, — it is not they, not 
their love and mercy, not their intercession that 
can remove one feather from the weight of sin 
and guiltiness, or abate one jot of the righteous 
retributions we have incurred. The most friend- 
less, and the best befriended, stand equal and 
alone alike at that bar, — alone with God. 

Such are some of the modes of that loneliness 
which is assigned to every mortal to bear and to 
feel. These are a few hints of the universal ex- 
perience. It must some time be yours, and mine, 
and every man's. We must tread the wine-press 
alone. 

And God is wise in this solemn and sad ap- 
pointment. He would teach us to find Him, to 
commune with Him, in that solitariness which 
none other may enter. No number and no de- 
votedness of earthly friends can be always suffi- 
cient for the soul. The times must come when 
they are powerless and must withdraw. It will 
be felt then, and it should be felt before, that 
the Almighty and unfailing friend should not be 
left out of our regards, unknown and unheeded. 
Human love cannot always stand us instead. 
The hour cometh when God, our Father, must be 
all to us, or we have nothing. When we must 
discern his presence and his love, or find desola- 
tion indeed ; when we must have trust in his 
mercy, for all other trust fails ; when we must 



\ 



24 / have trodden the Wine-Press alone. 



take his outstretched hand or sink, helpless and 
utterly forsaken, and every spark of hope be 
quenched. Acquaint now thyself with God, and 
seek Him while He may be found, for the days 
draw nigh when thou canst have no other. Make 
thy peace with Him now by penitence and obe- 
dience. Make thyself near to Him in confidence 
and prayer. 

Our religion inspires the hope that when all 
the waste places of earth and time and death 
shall have been passed, and they who have 
pleased God shall be welcomed to his many man- 
sions, the society of earth shall be more than 
renewed by a spiritual and enduring companion- 
ship with the blest, in unchanging love and holi- 
ness. But we cannot reach that abode till we 
have trodden the wine-press alone ; till we have 
learned, in solemn experience, that every friend 
faileth us in our need, and that God must be all 
in all. We must pass alone through the great 
issues of existence, lose the pressure of every 
hand, the light of every eye, the cheer of every 
voice. Let us see to it that we carry into those 
dread passages of our being the things that may 
sustain us in that trial of loneliness ; the good 
affections that live on though their objects dis- 
appear; the hallowed memories that survive the 
social scenes in which they had their birth ; the 
strength of soul that the good and loving may 
have imparted, and that may remain in us though 
they are not by to exert it ; the satisfactions that 
may continue, though the sphere of duty where 



/ have trodden the Wine-Press alone. 25 

we won them has faded away ; the hopes that will 
still yield their cheering flame when there is no 
other light, and that faith of a pious heart that 
all the waters of death cannot quench. We 
should make these our own, and secure them 
early and surely. We must not live on without 
them. Amid the multitudes of friends, amid all 
strong sympathies and fond affections, the smiles 
of fortune and of love, remember the sure coming 
times of loneliness, and make close and strong 
the tie that joins thee to thy God. And when 
the struggle comes in which none can help, the 
sorrow which none can console, and the pains 
that none can alleviate, and the grave opens for 
thy coming, and the bar of righteous judgment 
appears for thy hearing, — in all that loneliness 
make it now the heart's familiar speech, — I am 
not alone, nevertheless ; I am not alone, for the 
Father, his hand shall lead me and his right hand 
uphold me ; his countenance is my light, and his 
mercy is my refuge and my trust 
1847. 



III. 



LIFE A VOYAGE. 

Behold also the ships. — James iii. 4. 

THE Apostle makes this maritime allusion 
to illustrate a single point of morality, and 
we may properly take it up in reference to the 
whole moral condition of life. The sacred writers, 
and indeed all moralists, have been fond of such 
analogies. The poetry of all ages, in its more 
serious strains, is filled with the similitudes of 
life, finding emblems of man's profoundest spirit- 
ual experiences in the things and events of God's 
outward creation and providence. 

And the human mind generally has been dis- 
posed to take up and repeat those likenings, for 
instruction and impression, and for the expression 
of its own more serious reflections. Accordingly 
they have found a place in the familiar prov- 
erbs of all races. Human life is so vast, so 
mysterious a theme, contains so many problems 
that are inexplicable from their grandeur and 
complexity, and involves so many interests that 
press home upon every man's heart and con- 
sciousness, that it will make itself a subject of 
frequent contemplation, in some of its larger 



Life a Voyage. 



27 



or smaller departments and aspects. And we 
always feel as if we had obtained some little 
illumination of the theme, or had thrown some 
faint ray of wisdom upon it, whenever we find or 
utter any one of those similitudes which illus- 
trate what we cannot describe, and reveal by 
symbolic suggestions what we cannot compre- 
hend in propositions. 

We hardly need go beyond the Bible to obtain 
a complete series of those analogies to which I 
have referred, and which find a place in all lit- 
erature, and occasional recognition in the daily 
speech and sober meditations of men. We find 
in the Bible no elaborate, exhaustive description 
of human life, for that could not be contained 
in human language ; but we find numerous simil- 
itudes. Life is a battle, or a campaign. It is a 
race, a pilgrimage, or a journey. It is a dream, 
a vapor, or a tale that is told. It is a vineyard, 
a field to labor in. It is a stewardship, or money 
in trust. It is a school, a temporary tent, a fore- 
court or porch to a temple eternal in the heav- 
ens, and many things of this kind, which the 
moralist loves to seize upon, to give point to the 
trite precepts of Christian virtue ; which the poet 
loves to expand, to give beauty to moral wis- 
dom, and the popular heart cherishes as giving a 
body to its vague impressions of high and solemn 
truth. 

Our text suggests one of these analogies, — and 
one of the most impressive and fertile of them. 
" Behold also the ships." Life is a voyage. The 



28 Life a Voyage. 



sea and men's dealings with it have always sup- 
plied many symbols to body forth men's earnest 
thoughts on the career, the fortunes, the experi- 
ences, the dangers, and the hopes of the human 
being, as he passes over the narrow straits of 
time into the ocean of eternity. To one familiar 
with the aspects of the sea, and yet not so famil- 
iar with them as to make them commonplace, 
and limited to the mere associations of business, 
— to such an one the sea is perhaps the most 
impressive part of the creation, and is fraught 
with moral suggestions of the most striking and 
elevated character. There is nothing in nature, 
except perhaps the evening sky, — which is almost 
too familiar a spectacle to preserve its lessons 
fresh, — there is nothing else that gives such an 
impression of infinity as the ocean. To the eye, 
and almost to the imagination, it is boundless. 
To the plummet, it is unfathomable. Its depths 
are secret and mysterious. Abroad on its open 
expanse no objects intervene to help us to com- 
pass its vastness, or to weaken our sense of its 
grandeur. And the power which the sea exhibits 
deepens this feeling of infinity. The sea, ever 
moving, never resting, heaving every moment 
from its foundations, and sending its huge tidal 
waves as by one act, and in one unbroken series, 
around the globe, — one hour so tranquil and 
beneficent, and the next a devouring monster, — 
to-day bearing the navies of the earth gently 
upon its friendly bosom, and to-morrow, it may 
be, ready to wrench them to pieces by its vio- 



Life a Voyage. 



29 



lence,* and to engulf them in its opening depths, 
— it is as it were a living omnipotence — omnip- 
otence in action, — the visible type of Almighty 
power, put forth in sensible reality. In other 
departments of nature the omnipotence of God 
is rather an inference of the understanding, — 
something that was displayed at some remote 
and uncertain period of creation. The sea is a 
present image and expression of it. And then 
the sea is so unchanging. The land is always 
varying its aspect. The seasons diversify it con- 
stantly. The face of it is altered by the works of 
man, from generation to generation, and from 
year to year. The very heavens are changed, as 
to the place and arrangement of the stars, every 
night and every hour. But the sea changes not. 
The first families of men saw it as we see it, 
Age after age, men have looked forth and ven- 
tured upon it, and through all time it has been 
to them what it is to us, — presenting to the eye 
and to the ear *and to the feeling the same 
boundless expanse, the same mounting and 
breaking of its waves, the same solemn moan 
and roar, the same unwearied flowing and ebb- 
ing of its tides. When we look upon Niagara, 
who is not constrained, among the multitude of 
thoughts which crowd upon one in that stupen- 
dous scene, to ask himself : Is it possible that 
it has been rolling over thus ; flowing on and 
sounding on, so vast and so majestic, through 
the long ages ? And when we have come home, 
does not the question arise : Can it be that 



30 



Life a Voyage. 



it still keeps on, just the same, day and night, 
summer and winter, and is to keep on so for- 
ever ? The same questionings are natural to 
one who muses by the sea-shore. There it is, 
the mighty deep, rolling on the same forever. 
The waves advancing, breaking, and retreating 
to-day, just as they did unknown ages ago, and 
will keep on doing without rest or interruption, 
for unknown ages to come. I do not know any- 
thing in the other aspects of nature, — certainly 
not in any numerical calculations, — or any efforts 
of abstract thought, that give so vivid and solemn 
an impression of the vast stretch of time, of the 
unbounded continuity of existence, so near an 
approximation to a sense and an appreciation of 
eternity. 

Such are the elements of the feeling of infinity 
connected with the sea. And that is the bond 
of sympathy between it and the soul. Any im- 
pression of the infinite which we ever obtain 
awakens a sense of something that corresponds 
to it in our own nature and being. There is 
something infinite, immeasurable, incomprehensi- 
ble in our own souls. The sea is almost brother 
to the human spirit, — the type, the mirror of 
some of the same great attributes imaged forth 
within us. Here within us are desires, restless 
and insatiable ; affections that never find objects 
adequate to fill and exhaust them ; thoughts that 
pass beyond all bounds of material things ; facul- 
ties that have never found their limit ; suscepti- 
bilities of enjo3'ment and of suffering which it is 



Life a Voyage. 



31 



almost appalling to think of ; fears which the 
image of unutterable hells has not been able to 
outrun, and hopes which this world can do little 
more than provoke, and a thousand worlds, such 
as we are yet able to conceive of, could not sat- 
isfy or outstrip. And then that ever-haunting 
sense of a something within that shall not die, — 
the overshadowing consciousness of an immortal 
nature and an endless career, — a feeling which 
may be shaped into a fixed and definite faith, or 
may be a dreamy speculation, or even but a half 
conscious anticipation, yet which can never be 
divorced from the living soul, can never di t out 
of it wholly, can never be reasoned out of it, nor 
denied nor scoffed out of it, but must mix itself, 
consciously or unconsciously, with the deep fount- 
ains of the heart's emotions, and move and act 
among the very roots of our being. 

Yes, there is an infinity investing and perme- 
ating our mental life. Every man feels it some- 
times, though he use not the name, or know 
not what it means. There is a sense of it that 
accompanies all great thought, all profound feel- 
ing, all living and elevated moods of mind, and 
helps to raise and magnify them. Whatever in 
the outward universe helps that feeling, and be- 
comes its type, its memorial, and its guide, is 
as improving, as uplifting to the soul, as it is 
beautiful to the imagination and dear and wel- 
come to the heart. And it is because the great 
ocean has this likeness to spiritual reality, this 
sympathy and kinship with the human spirit, 



32 



Life a Voyage. 



that it has been so rich in its moral suggestions 
to the meditative mind, and has supplied so 
many emblems of human life in the common 
thought and speech of men. 

But the metaphors that abound in all human 
languages derive their chief force from more 
specific similitudes. A fine ship going out of 
her port is more like a thing of life than any 
other object in the inanimate creation, — so grace- 
ful, majestic, and buoyant. She is always spoken 
of as a person, never referred to in the neuter 
gender. The sailor's language of pride, of con- 
fidence, respecting his good ship, is the language 
of personification, regards her as alive, perform- 
ing well of her own good will, responsible for 
her faults, and entitled to the praise of all her 
successes. Almost a human interest attaches 
to her as she starts for her destination. The 
merchant's hopes go with her; she may make, 
or she may mar, his fortunes, as she behaves, 
or as Providence favors her. The affections 
and the prayers of many hearts on shore — of 
wife and mother and children — hover over her 
as she parts from her moorings, and follow her 
on her pathless course v Tender hopes and anx- 
ious fears, and long lingering uncertainty, await 
the issue of her adventure. And the ship herself 
looks — or such is the power of association that 
she seems to look and to move — in sympathy 
with these human feelings. She seems instinct 
with proud confidence, as she bounds forth upon 
the bosom of the sea, and with her head directed 



Life a Voyage. 



33 



to her distant port breasts the tide and parts 
the wave, and spreads her sails trustfully to the 
winds as if she were stronger than all the ele- 
ments, and could compel them to serve her. 
And then, again, as she prudently takes her pilot, 
and seems to feel after the safe channel, and 
watches the lights and the buoys, and shuns the 
hidden rocks, and measures her distance from 
the visible headlands, she seems as if she were 
conscious of her frailty and aware of the perils 
that beset her, and felt the need of constant vigi- 
lance and precaution, as if she feared as well as 
hoped. Through the eye of her master, who is 
rather her servant, she wakes night and day, and 
watches the clouds and the winds, and every sign 
of hidden shoals and of land ahead, and in the 
dark puts a light aloft to warn her sisters of the 
deep against the fatal collision. 

Yes, this is an image of human life in some 
of its aspects. No wonder that seamen apply 
personal epithets and ascribe personal qualities 
to their ships, and that the eyes and hearts of 
men follow her, as she moves from her port, with 
a human interest and sympathy. 

It is with a like feeling that the eye of love 
and sympathy watches and follows man, as he 
goes forth from the haven of his youthful home 
and domestic security upon the voyage of life, 
upon the broad sea of business and adventure, 
with everything to hope for, and yet with every- 
thing at stake. 

What an era, what a crisis it is to the youth 
3 



34 



Life a Voyage. 



himself, and to those few whose hearts are bound 
up in him, when he sets out upon his own, his in- 
dependent life, to shape his own destiny, to stand 
by his own strength, or to fall by his own weak- 
ness. How he shall fare, how he shall conduct 
himself, on his voyage, and how complete it, is a 
question of more profound and thrilling moment 
to him, and to those with whose hopes and fears 
and affections his life is freighted, than the fate 
of empires and the destinies of half the world 
beside. Happy if we could always see him with 
the signs of the same wisdom that mark the 
movements of his inanimate type, the good ship 
starting on her voyage. We like to discern in 
him the same energetic qualities, the same buoy- 
ant and hopeful spirit, the same brave front and 
gallant step, as if to tread the waves of fortune 
triumphantly under his feet, and leave them to 
gather up and smooth themselves at their leisure 
in his wake, while he moves on unimpeded and 
rejoicing. We love to see in him the same stout 
courage and good cheer, as he spreads his can- 
vas confidently to the winds of heaven. We do 
not want to see him keeping aloof from the great 
sea of stirring life, like a ship rotting at the 
wharf, or creeping timidly along the familiar 
shore. Let him launch forth boldly. Let him 
venture upon the deep sea of life if he feels that 
he is built and furnished for it. Let him try his 
own powers. Let him enter upon the sphere 
where only a guarding Providence and his own 
true heart can help him and keep him. The 



Life a Voyage. 



35 



manly voyage of life must, like all other voyages, 
be carried out in some sense alone. And so be 
it. Let us have confidence in youth, and let it 
have confidence in itself, — confidence and hope, 
courage and energy. 

But those other qualities of the good ship, the 
prudence, the vigilance, the sense of frailty and of 
peril, let the young man have these also. There 
are rocks of temptation in the sea of life that will 
dash him to pieces if he recklessly run upon them. 
There are sudden gusts, and long-blowing gales 
of passion which, if he let them strike him unpre- 
pared, will sink him in the deeps of sin and ruin. 
There are false lights to lure him to a fatal shore. 
There are a thousand dangers that may wreck 
him, even as the goodliest ship, and the proudest 
that was ever built of heart of oak, may founder 
like a log in the mid-ocean, or be cast up, a shat- 
tered hulk, on the beach. Let him know his 
dangers. Let him know that he is frail. Let 
him know that he is but a cockle-shell on the 
crests of the sea, unless he be prepared and 
braced at all points. The mighty elements of 
the moral world will toss and rend him as lightly 
as a child's paper boat, if he commit himself, 
weak and careless, to their power. Let him 
watch and strive. The strongest ship will not 
live a day at sea with her sails set and all hands 
asleep. A wakeful energy exercised without an 
hour's intermission, is the only means of her 
safety and good success. And human well-being, 
depend upon it, is not secured more easily or 
with less constancy of care and exertion. 



36 



Life a Voyage. 



Go forth bravely, in the confidence of your 
young, exuberant spirits, upon the voyage of life, 
bravely and hopefully, but seriously, humbly, 
cautiously. It is a dread voyage upon a deep, 
deep sea, amid howling winds, and dark nights, 
and treacherous currents, and angry waves. And 
your bark is frail at the best. Be not over-confi- 
dent. Be not rash. Trifle not with any danger. 
Brave not with a fool-hardy courage the mighty 
elements that assail you. Watch day and night, 
with a strong will and a quick conscience and a 
prayerful heart. Your all is at stake. There is 
but one voyage of life ; there is no second trial. 
If you are wrecked, there is the end for you, — 
ruin to yourself, and wretchedness for many hearts 
that beat for you. If you prosper, the soul's for- 
tune is won, — a precious freight, treasure to be 
laid up in heaven, and made sure and safe for- 
ever. 

So far we have noticed the ship particularly as 
she goes out of port and starts upon her voyage ; 
but way out upon the shoreless sea she still fur- 
nishes her moral similitudes. She has her desti- 
nation. She never drifts at random. Her course 
is not left to accident to determine. She knows 
the point she would reach, and never forgets 
it. She has a magnetic needle for her guide. 
Through her helmsman's eye she notices how it 
points almost every moment, and never slights its 
silent intimations, nor disobeys its infallible di- 
rections. It is a little, unobtrusive thing, shut up 
speechless in its box ; but the ship's whole huge, 



Life a Voyage. 



37 



proud bulk obeys it, and imagines no other way 
of safety for itself. 

And the chart is constantly spread out to give 
warning of every secret peril, and the distance 
and conformation of every known coast. And 
the lead is thrown, to get warning of danger in 
season, and the quadrant is in hand to bring wis- 
dom from the heavens for her guidance. 

How like human life it is ! Verily, life is a 
voyage. It has no other image so striking and 
complete. The ship and the man are consti- 
tuted alike. Man, too, has his appointed destina- 
tion. There is something which all these facul- 
ties are appointed to accomplish. There is a 
goal in the horizon which they are destined to 
reach. There is a definite work for them to do, 
a fit character and state of being for them to 
achieve. These vast powers and susceptibilities 
with which the soul is endowed we know are not 
designed to play idly upon the waves of time, or 
be floated hither and thither by every chance 
breeze of influence or caprice. There is a port, 
an aim, towards which it is for man to set his 
face steadily, and bend his energies firmly, and 
ply the wheel with vigilant and unyielding reso- 
lution. To form and finish forth a whole-souled 
man, complete in virtue, freighted with moral 
riches, and prosperous in good deeds, — to round 
out a well-spent life and make it a good voyage, 
— this is the object, never to be lost sight of, 
never to veer from, nor slackly strive for, let the 
winds of fortune blow as high and as adversely 



38 



Life a Voyage. 



as they may, or whatever perils and labors may 
rise up and threaten or obstruct. 

And there is in man the same apparatus to 
assist and guide him in his course and to his 
goal as in a ship. There is the needle magnet 
of his conscience by which to steer. A mysteri- 
ous divine influence has touched its point, so 
that by an attraction and a power which we can- 
not comprehend it turns and bends, tremblingly, 
yet straight and steadily, to God and duty and 
the right, — the fixed, eternal pole of virtue. It 
is small, it is silent, it may be easily put aside 
and out of sight and disregarded. But ask the 
mariner if that will do. Ask him if the proudest 
ship can dispense with that mysterious thread of 
steel. No, not in the ship, nor in the human 
heart any more. It must be kept in its protected 
place, sacred from all interference. It must be 
allowed to play freely on its pivot ; no disturbing 
influences must be suffered to come near it. It 
must be placed close by the rudder of the will, 
right under the helmsman's eye. He must watch 
it ever with reverent solicitude. The rust of neg- 
lect must not gather upon it ; the salt spray of 
corroding passion must not have access to it. 
And it must be touched anew in the ship some- 
times with a magnet more powerful than itself; 
and in the soul it must be touched often, habit- 
ually, and replenished with the divine spirit, and 
renewed with that spiritual magnetism which 
comes through God's word and good examples, 
and meditative truth and the prayer of faith. 



Life a Voyage. 



39 



My friends, lose not the fact in the figure. Fol- 
low the conscience, watch it, — be it ever kept 
in sight, close by the will, kept free and unen- 
cumbered. Be it enlightened from above and 
kept true to its pole by the ever incoming Spirit. 
Peril and loss and moral wreck attend the neg- 
lect of it. Let it rule, though so small and trem- 
ulous ; let it rule the whole great fabric of your 
being and direct you in all your aims, and go 
with you, the supreme, unquestioned guide, amid 
all desires, all ambitions, all dangers, and all 
successes, in the fair sunshine and in the stormy 
night of life, even unto the end. So only shall 
you come nobly into port, and not wander from 
your course, nor founder by the way. 

And the chart, — that, too, is furnished, and 
must be used for the voyage of life. It is for 
man, as for the ship, the result and sum total of 
other men's experience. In the voyage of life 
we must give heed to the collective wisdom of 
mankind. Some portion of it is spread before 
each one of us for our guidance. It is the chart 
of experience. Other men, the multitude, have 
made the same voyage, and sailed for .the same 
port. Some have been wrecked, some damaged 
and disabled, and some have come in triumph- 
antly, and all of them instruct us by their ex- 
perience. They have jotted down the treacher- 
ous reef, the fatal whirlpool, the intercepting bar, 
and also the safe roadstead, the good anchorage, 
and how and where to find the friendly current 
and the favoring wind. Study other men's moral 



40 



Life a Voyage. 



experience. See how it was that the fallen fell, 
and how the crippled were hurt ; and how it 
was that the strong stood their ground, and how . 
the saved escaped their dangers. Let the wise 
tell us how they found and kept the ways of wis- 
dom. Let the foolish tell us how they came to 
disregard their compass, or sleep upon their 
watch, or let the gale of passion find them un- 
prepared. Let the lost show us the rock on 
which they split. Take warning and take coun- 
sel. Let the by-gone generations instruct us. 
As it has been with others so it will be with us, 
for good or for evil, if we do likewise. 

And then that instrument which the mariner 
lifts every day to the heavens. Even terrestrial 
navigation must seek help from above. The ma- 
terial globe cannot be traversed in safety but by 
daily reference to a celestial luminary. Much 
less can the voyage of life prosper without it. 
This life must have light and direction from on 
high. There must man look for light and direc- 
tion ; the spiritual quadrant must not be laid 
aside nor left at home. We must take it with us 
wherever^we go, into the thick of business, into 
the whirl of pleasure, into the night of storms, 
and raise it daily to God in devout and earnest 
thought, to measure our progress, to iaiow our 
losses and our wanderings, to ascertain our posi- 
tion and what is before us. The life on earth 
will not go on safely and well but with constant 
reference to the light of heaven and the will of 
God. Pass no day of the life-voyage without 



Life a Voyage. 



4i 



recurrence to the things above. Let the seamen 
instruct us. " Behold also the ships." 

One more similitude. How beautiful and grand 
an object is the stately ship coming into her port ! 
She furls her sails and is made fast to her moor- 
ings, and rests upon her graceful shadow. How 
has she struggled and labored ! What forces has 
she resisted, and what dangers eluded ! She 
has not shut her watchful eye one moment, day 
or night, for so long. She has carried well what 
was committed to her. She has brought what 
was expected, and kept sacred the charge of 
life and treasure with which she was intrusted. 
Through the whole sphere of worldly enterprise 
and success, I doubt if there be another object 
that is looked upon by the beholders with so 
much elation, satisfaction, and solicitude changed 
to triumph and joy, as such a coming in of the 
good ship from her far adventures and her ocean 
journey. It is an imposing and a lovely sight. 

But there is one other spectacle that in beauty, 
grandeur, and joy transcends that as far as the 
spiritual transcends the material, and eternity ex- 
ceeds time. It is the life voyage of man com- 
pleted in success and safety. It is the soul, sent 
forth oh the deep and dangerous sea of life, and 
to far regions of labor and hazard, and then re- 
turned prosperous and full-freighted. It is the 
close of a well-spent life. The toil is over and 
the danger past, — the secure and peaceful haven 
reached, the spirit's haven of repose, — the end 
of cares, the end of pains, the tranquil rest of the 



42 



Life a Voyage. 



evening hour of a good life, passing gently 
through the twilight into the night of death, and 
the brighter dawning of the eternal day, where is 
rest and joy for evermore. 

Brethren, we are all making the one life voyage. 
Here we are in the midst of struggles and toils 
and false lights and frequent storm and darkness. 
Let us be patient and vigilant and persevering. 
Follow conscience and gather wisdom and look 
to God. And as we press on with courage^ and 
hope, let us look with faith forward to the haven 
of our rest, to the welcome and the joy, the honor 
and the peace, with which our happy coming in 
shall be greeted by all who know and love us. 
Oh ! precious a thousand times beyond the price 
of all the prizes of this world shall be the satis- 
factions that glow and gladden in the soul, when 
life's voyage closes in the triumphs of virtue and 
the beauty of the spirit's success ! And the bark 
freighted with eternal interests and heavenly 
treasures shall come securely into its appointed 
haven of endless rest and joy. 
1850. 



IV. 



JESUS AND SOLOMON. 

And Jesus walked in the temple, in Solomon's porch. — John x. 23. 

THE temple actually built by Solomon had 
been burned five hundred years before by 
Nebuchadnezzar when he conquered and sacked 
Jerusalem ; but the Jews, on their return from 
their Syrian captivity, restored the sacred edifice 
on the same spot, and it was afterwards rebuilt or 
enlarged by King Herod just before the advent 
of Christ. The original structure of Solomon, 
however, was the type and model of the succeed- 
ing ones, and one porch in particular, a portico, or 
piazza on the eastern side, was preserved through 
all these changes in the original style, and re- 
tained the name of Solomon's Porch, covering the 
same ground and wearing the same aspect as the 
one he built. It was a monument to his memory. 
And now our text presents to our view Jesus 
walking there and meditating things of his king- 
dom on the spot that was vocal with the name, 
and sacred to the memory, of his illustrious an- 
cestor. Jesus walking in the porch of Solomon. 
It brings the two names, the two persons, into 
conjunction. The lowly Nazarene pacing the 



44 Jesus and Solomon. 



marble floor, as it were with the shade of the 
great king Solomon at his side. Perhaps, in that 
hour of musing in that scene, his own thought 
went back to the great king who had left there 
the record of his name and a relic of his glory. 
However that may have .been, it is a conjunction 
that to our contemplation brings together the two 
remotely separated periods of Jewish history, the 
two members of the same royal family, each so 
great, yet so different in character and position, 
united by ties of blood, and of the like national- 
ity of feeling, and a similar greatness of destiny 
and influence, and yet separated by a great inter- 
val of time, a total reverse of circumstances, and 
as wide a discrepancy of spirit and purpose as 
is possible between two modes of greatness, two 
types of power. 

Solomon and Jesus ; they are two representa- 
tive characters, and illustrate each other by their 
contrasts. They are the two brightest names in 
Jewish history, and in that circumstance alone do 
they resemble each other; in all others unlike. 
Solomon was born in a king's palace, the fa- 
vored son, nursed in pomp and luxury as heir to 
the throne. Jesus, though of the same lineage, 
was born in a stable, and brought up as a provin- 
cial peasant. Solomon flourished at the period 
when his country was at its height of power and 
glory. Industry and the arts flourished, commer- 
cial enterprise extended itself as never in the 
world before, and wealth poured in in bounteous 
streams. Luxury and splendor came in like a 



Jesus and Solomon. 



45 



tide. It was the era of magnificent architecture, 
and the imperial city was built over anew with 
temple and palaces of marble and cedar and 
gold. It was the high noon of pride and splen- 
dor over Jerusalem. It was the spring-tide of 
the nation's prosperity and might, and King Solo- 
mon upon the pinnacle of this greatness, the pre- 
siding and informing genius of it, himself the chief 
ornament, the shining symbol of it all. Jesus 
appeared at a time when all that glory had faded 
out and passed away, with but here and there 
a crumbling and melancholy memento of it left. 
Independence and power, wealth and magnifi- 
cence all gone, the nation groaning under a for- 
eign yoke, humbled in pride and broken in spirit, 
and Himself without name or influence even in 
the poor and hollow form of national polity that 
yet remained. 

And while the contrast was so great in the two 
national conditions upon which those two great 
ones of Israel — Solomon and Jesus — severally 
looked forth from that spot, equally wide was the 
contrast in the moods and thoughts and aims of 
those two great souls as they there in their soli- 
tary walk communed with themselves, or looked 
forth upon the scene that lay before them. Sol- 
omon built the temple at the beginning of his 
reign, so we may imagine him walking and medi- 
tating there in the prime of his days. We may 
well conceive what were the aspirations in his 
country's behalf that fired his mind as he paced 
to and fro among those lofty columns. He feels 



4 6 



yesus and Solomon. 



in himself the force of great talents, the glow of 
great conceptions, the opportunities of a grand 
position. " I will make this city rich and splen- 
did, the centre of a mighty state. Kings and 
queens shall visit it to marvel and emulate. The 
national worship shall be magnificent. Learning 
and the arts shall be cultivated. The pleasures 
and appliances of a refined civilization shall be 
brought in and diffused. The merchants of the 
earth shall come to trade. The soil shall teem 
with abundance, and great revenues shall accrue. 
Justice shall be administered, and order main- 
tained, and plenty spread abroad, and beauty and 
prosperity shall crown all these heights of the 
holy land." Right kingly and noble were these 
aspiring thoughts, as the young monarch revolved 
them in his clear, capacious mind, and it would 
seem as if they were the only great thoughts that 
were worthy of the scene ; but not so. Behold 
Jesus a thousand years later walking there, and 
taking counsel with the aspirations of his youth- 
ful heart. No such visions of outward glory 
filled the imaginations or shaped and braced the 
resolves of his young soul, but He too could as- 
pire loftily, and felt within Him the movings of 
a sublime spirit and a great purpose. " I, too, 
would bless and exalt this people ; I would estab- 
lish among them a higher kingdom, and invest 
this beloved city with a more enduring splendor, 
strength and peace ; to this end was I born ; for 
this purpose was I sent ; but it is the kingdom of 
truth and of righteousness, and that alone, that 



Jesus and Solomon. 47 

can suffice for my country's welfare. The reign 
of love and holiness must be brought in, and to 
this end do I consecrate myself ; called to it by 
God's great inspiration breathing and burning 
within me, I must call back the people to their 
God. I must renew in them his blurred and 
broken image. I must show them the paths of a 
truer blessedness. I must humble their pride 
into piety, their turbulent worldliness into tran- 
quil spiritual hope. No matter for this outward 
decay, no matter though these ancient city walls 
have breaches in them, no matter though this 
overarching temple be shorn of its former glory, 
no matter that a foreign ruler holds his court in 
yonder palace halls, and foreign soldiers defile 
sullenly up -the sides of Zion, and along these 
decaying streets, — no matter for these things, 
if Jerusalem but knew the things that belonged 
to her true peace. And she shall know them. 
Though I die for it she shall hear the truth from 
my lips, the truth that shall make her free, the 
spirit that shall redeem her, a higher prosperity 
than Solomon conceived of, a glory outshining his 
glory, for I know by the voice of God whispering 
within me that a greater than Solomon is here." 

Again, read the thoughts of the builder as he 
walked up and down in his porch, thinking what 
should be his share of all that greatness and 
happiness he was meditating for his capital. He 
would have a monarch's magnificence and enjoy- 
ment, and that an Eastern monarch's. He would 
fill his harem with beauty and wit. He would 



4 8 



Jesus and Solomon. 



have pleasure-gardens and parks and fish-ponds, 
grand houses and great works and vineyards and 
orchards ; silver and gold he would have in great 
store. Men singers and women singers, and 
musical instruments, and all the delights of the 
sons of men he would have, chariots and horses, 
and great and small cattle, and slaves, and wine 
and mirth. He would exhaust the rich earth's 
resources for pleasure. 

And then in a higher mood, — for he was no 
mere sensualist, but was endowed with high in- 
tellectual faculties and cravings, — he said within 
himself, and there was new majesty in his step 
and his look as he revolved the higher thought : 
" I will cultivate wisdom, I will gather up all the 
delights of learning, I will acquaint myself with 
the sages, I will be the chief of them. I will run 
through the scale of the sciences, and know the 
secrets of nature, know of trees from the cedar 
to the hyssop, and of fowl and of creeping things 
and of fishes." He would be a poet, and sing in 
the strains to which the nation's heart should 
vibrate forever. He would be the oracle of prac- 
tical wisdom, and gather into books the pro- 
foundest maxims of all generations. So he would 
have pleasure and learning and fame and influ- 
ence, and be great beyond all those that had 
dwelt in Jerusalem before him. A royal train of 
meditation was that to pursue beneath those 
arches that should bear his famous name, coupled 
with every conception of grandeur and renown, 
down to remote generations. 



yesus and Solomon. 49 

And now pass over the centuries, and follow 
the thought of Jesus as, treading the same floor, 
He considers wrlat lot and reward await Him in 
his so different work. He expects not the cup 
of pleasure, but the cup of bitterness ; not the 
crown of gold, but of thorns ; not to bear a scep- 
tre in his hands, but a cross on his shoulder ; not 
a garden of delight in Heshbon, but of agony in 
Gethsemane ; not palace-chambers, but less of a 
sheltering home than the foxes and the birds 
enjoy ; not the garlands of fame, but the execra- 
tions of the multitude ; and yet his anticipations 
are not few and faint. He looks for inward 
riches and peace. He foretastes the deeper de- 
lights of a heart sacrificing itself for love and 
duty, enriched with all spiritual fullness and joy, 
basking in the smiles of God, reposing in the 
Father's bosom, and looking in serene, immov- 
able faith to the rest and the recompense laid up 
for Him in heavenly mansions. See Him looking 
forth with youthful eye from that high porch of 
the temple upon the people thronging below : 
"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, and ye her sons and 
daughters ; ye will not hear me, nor heed me, nor 
let me gather and bless you as I would. Ye will 
revile and stone me, and pursue me to the bitter 
end; but I will bless -you and your children after 
you. I will lay down my life. Although brief, 
it shall be fruitful in enduring benefactions. I 
will speak my word, and though it be into un- 
willing ears it shall yet go forth to redeem and 
gladden the world, a saving power, a guiding 
4 



50 



Jesus and Solomon. 



light, a source of gladness, and a guaranty of 
peace; and though I have nothing else, I shall 
have a heart full and warm with the love of man 
and the love of God." 

Once more go back to the days of the great 
king, and behold his changed look, and listen to 
his altered tone as in the season of his old age 
he takes his solitary evening walk along the mag- 
nificent colonnade. He is an old man now, and 
his great career has been run ; his young aspira- 
tion has grown into matu"re experience. The fire 
of his eye, the vigor of his frame, the bounding 
confidence of his mind, are gone, and now he 
reviews the work of his life, and all the labor 
which he had labored to do, and what he had 
brought to pass, and what he had gained by the 
way, and whither he had arrived. It is with a 
halting step that he moves now along the pave- 
ment that he had once trod with so brave a bear- 
ing. He no longer lifts his arm nor strikes the 
air at the impulse of ambition, or at the emphasis 
of his proud determinations ; but he pauses, he 
stoops, he shrinks into himself, he shudders, he 
weeps, while he settles there the long and fast- 
closing account of his conscience, and recalls the 
illusions of life as they have dropped away, one 
after another, leaving in the memory only the 
sad record of their emptiness. Happily we can 
read his thoughts without drawing upon our imag- 
inations. We learn them from the facts of his 
history as interpreted by his own records. As 
regards the welfare of his people for whom he 



yesus and Solomon. 



5i 



had designed so much and labored so long, he 
finds that his reign has been a splendid failure. 
The great things that he intended for the glory 
of the nation and the adornment of the capital 
had impoverished his subjects. Oppressed with 
taxes their resources are exhausted. Luxury has 
sapped their strength and corrupted the public 
taste. They are poor and enervated. The glory 
has cost too much. Sullen discontent prevails. 
He has lost his popularity. The loyal hosannas 
that should greet him as he passed along sound 
hollow. The homage of the crowd is constrained 
and reluctant. The voice of moody threatening 
is heard. He knows that the evil days are at 
hand, that the retribution of his mistakes shall 
be visited upon his successors, that scarcely can 
things go on through his day, and scarcely shall 
his day be closed when his kingdom, which he 
was to make perpetual, shall .be rent in twain, 
and the strength and glory of Israel depart for- 
ever, and these temple walls and yonder palace- 
heights begin to crack and shake, weakening 
from year to year in readiness for the spoiler's 
hand. He knows, through that profound sagacity 
which gave him the title of the wisest of men, 
that, though his countrymen of after ages, in the 
weakness and blindness of national pride, would 
boast of him and of his splendid works and wor- 
ship his memory, the great monarch, the type 
of an illustrious epoch, yet the truly wise must 
see that his wisdom had been folly, his glory an 
illusion, his reign of magnificence and luxury the 



52- 



yesus and Solomon. 



ruinous beginning of a fearful end. So miserably 
ends the dream of his generous and vaulting am- 
bition, and it is no cheerful retrospect that now 
engages his meditative hour. 

And then he must review his own career and 
character, and he does it, and he left behind a 
melancholy record of it. He has realized his 
youthful visions of pleasure and self-indulgence, 
fathomed and exhausted the Epicurean philoso- 
phy ages before Epicurus was born, tried every 
act of enjoyment more thoroughly than mortal 
ever did, and the whole of that portion of his 
life has left but one feeling, that of bitterness 
and disgust, and he had but one word left for it 
all, so mournful a word to speak in review of a 
responsible and irrecoverable life, — "Vanity of 
vanities, all is vanity and vexation of spirit." 

And he has tried all other resources for happi- 
ness that his genius could suggest, or power com- 
mand. He has tried wealth and splendor, and 
increased his goods more than all that were be- 
fore him in Jerusalem, and that was a failure ; 
" Vanity of vanities," is still all he can say. He 
has tried labor, toiling with energy and zeal to 
promote his country's advancement, but all with 
an earthly spirit and for earthly ends, and no 
good had come of it, and that was vanity of van- 
ities. He had mastered the nobler achievements 
of learning, run through the great circle of the 
sciences, gathered into his mind all the treasures 
of wisdom ; orator, poet, and author he had been, 
and renowned philosopher, but to no purpose. 



Jesus and Solomon. 53 

These things had not purified his heart, nor ele- 
vated his soul, nor ennobled his life, and even 
these to the old -man's fading eye were fruitless 
and worthless, and only like the rest, vanity of 
vanities. No true felicity had he found ; his ex- 
periments had all failed. No man ever tried so 
fully all the sources of worldly happiness, nor 
ever published with so much emphasis and sad- 
ness the utter insufficiency and failure of them 
all. And now, all he can do to retrieve these fatal 
errors of his life is to spend the closing days of it 
in bearing his humiliating testimony to the folly 
of all he had devised, and the emptiness of all he 
had achieved. There remained to him but the 
poor consolation of calling upon posterity to take 
warning by his example, and of preaching with 
his latest breath that higher wisdom which his 
whole life had belied, and which he had now dis- 
covered too late to profit by. There is a sad sin- 
cerity, an impressive earnestness, in those closing 
words of his last chapter : " Remember now thy 
Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil 
days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when 
thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them." 
"Let us hear," he says, "the conclusion of the 
whole matter : Fear God, and keep his command- 
ments : for this is the whole duty of man. For 
God shall bring every work into judgment, with 
every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether 
it be evil." These are the thoughts, we may 
readily suppose, with which the proudest mon- 
arch of Israel takes his last sad walk in the porch 
of his splendid temple. 



54 



Jesus and Solomon. 



A thousand years later his lineal descendant 
takes his last walk there and reviews his life. 
He too has done as he had proposed to Himself. 
He has kept his early vow and done the work 
which He had accepted in pious faith from his 
Father's hands to do. He has lived a life of 
purity and love. He has sowed the seeds of 
truth and virtue in the world. He has kindled a 
flame of renovating piety on earth that shall 
spread and never be quenched. He has planted 
the tree of life. He has revealed the Father. He 
has watered the parched deserts of the human 
mind with the living water, and now his career is 
closing, and no matter though it be in darkness 
and pain, He has nothing to regret, no errors to 
repine for, nor retrieve. All is light within 
and before Him. God draws nearer and nearer. 
His trust mounts up into joy and dear assurance. 
He can leave his fond legacy of perfect peace to 
his friends. He had tasted the sorrows of a 
hard, sad life, but they were expanding now to 
his thought into the glories of life eternal. His 
converse is with his God. " I have glorified thee 
on the earth. I have finished the work which 
thou gavest me to do, and now, O Father, glorify 
thou me with thine own self. And now I come 
to thee." And so with the ineffable peace of 
God in his heart we seem to see Him descending 
the steps of the porch of Solomon, as Solomon 
had descended them before Him, and passing on, 
not to a regal court and its splendid misery, but 
to his cross and to his heaven. 



yesns and Solomon. 



55 



These two illustrious persons are still, and for- 
ever, the types and representatives of the two 
great coordinate departments of human tenden- 
cies and interests, the worldly and the spiritual. 
Both are great. They both take hold of certain 
profound and indestructible elements of human 
nature, and both command a hearing and a fol- 
lowing, and both rightfully. Solomon is still the 
ideal of a great man, the impersonation of the 
natural desires of worldly enterprise, of worldly 
wisdom, of ambition for wealth and power and 
learning and influence and fame. And all these 
are deeply implanted elements of our nature 
which we cannot and would not abolish or ignore. 
We would not dare to pass sentence of condem- 
nation upon the very frame of our being, the 
courses of nature, the provisions of God, and all 
the activities and industries and ornaments and 
achievements and delights of this world-wide civ- 
ilization. We may and we must magnify and fol- 
low him, the Hebrew king and sage, but we must 
do it with a rigid restraint and limitation. It is 
a dangerous path, and to follow it in an un- 
checked career brings 'us, as it brought him, to 
shame and failure, and will wring from our hearts, 
as from his, the mournful confession, the comfort- 
less lamentation from out of the aching void of 
an impoverished soul, — "vanity of vanities." 
Pleasure will pall and disgust, wealth burden and 
canker the soul, success and aggrandisement 
reveal the deeper poverty and humiliation, and 
labor come to naught, and ambition be stripped 



56 



yesus and Solomon. 



of its illusions, and the senses turn inward for 
our tormenting, and our selfishness, when passion 
is stilled and the race is run, stands revealed in 
its native nakedness and ugliness. The worldly 
life unrestrained and unsatisfied must one day, 
even to our own eyes, bring the pain of discov- 
ered delusion and the sense of a wasted life, and 
the anguish of a troubled conscience and a gnaw- 
ing remorse. Oh, beware of that life whose last 
forced word is " Vanity of vanities ! " it is too 
late to alter it, too late for anything but to con- 
fess and mourn and vainly warn another. 

But from amid these worldly pursuits and ten- 
dencies that so hurry us on in a worldly career, 
look up to that other Leader and King and truer 
sage, — the soul's king, the teacher of a higher 
wisdom, the pattern of a higher life. Submit to 
his yoke, open the heart to his influence, keep 
his law of love and purity. Be his Father your 
Father, his life your life. 

Abroad in the week-day world we must in many 
things make the elder sage of Israel our type, 
and pay him the homage of our admiration and 
our following. The cares and pleasures, the toils 
and enterprises and shows of the world must en- 
gage our thoughts and energies ; but they do it 
too much, do they not ? engrossing our energies, 
our affections, too much, leading us too stren- 
uously on to that result which we shall find, as 
Solomon found, is but vanity and vexation of 
spirit. At least, then, when we gather here to 
worship in the name of that greater one of Israel, 



yesns and Solomon. 



57 



how does it become us to strive and pray that his 
spirit may take larger possession of our spirits, 
and may lift us into sympathy and communion 
with his thought, his faith, his feeling ; that our 
pleasures may be limited and hallowed by relig- 
ion, our wealth and influence and learning conse- 
crated by noble uses, our activity dignified with 
rectitude, and our selfishness sanctified by love 
and piety, so that our last words and thoughts 
and memories be not of the vanities that have 
cheated us and the glories that have mocked us, 
but of the blessedness and blamelessness of a 
well-spent life, the peace of an unworldly heart, 
the riches that are incorruptible, and the glory 
that fadeth not away, but shineth brighter and 
brighter unto the perfect day of heaven. 
.1854. 



V. 



ALMOST AND ALTOGETHER. 

Then Agrippa said unto Paul, Almost thou persuadest me to be a 
Christian. And Paul said, I would to God, that not only thou, but also 
all that hear me this day, were both almost, and altogether such as I am, 
except these bonds — Acts xxvi. 28, 29. 

THIS Agrippa was one of the Herods, that 
bad race of Jewish kings. The first of them 
was Herod the Great, whose reign was marked by 
many horrible deeds. He murdered his own wife 
and his two sons, and it was he who ordered the 
massacre of the children of Bethlehem in our 
Saviour's infancy. He was as able as he was 
bad. The next of them was his son, Herod Anti- 
pas, who ruled over Galilee, inheriting but a part 
of his father's dominions. It was this one who 
slew John the Baptist to please the daughter of 
Herodias. He was finally deposed by the Roman 
emperor, and died in banishment at Lyons, in 
Gaul, or France. The next of the line was Herod 
Agrippa, the son of Aristobulus, who was one of 
the children of Herod the Great killed by his 
father. He had spent his early life at Rome, and 
is said to have had the chief influence in the edu- 
cation of Caligula, one of the worst of the Roman 
emperors. He became king of the whole of 



Almost and Altogether. 59 

Palestine. It is he of whom it is written in the 
twelfth chapter of the Acts, that he "stretched 
forth his hands to vex certain of the church ; and 
he killed James the brother of John with the 
SAVord ; and because he saw it pleased the Jews, 
he proceeded further to take Peter also." His 
awful death is described in the same chapter. 
His son and successor was the Agrippa of our 
text, who was accordingly the great-grandson of 
Herod the Great. He reigned, as they all did, 
under vassalage to the Roman emperors. He 
appears to have had the family traits. His char- 
acter was a cross of the Jew and the Roman ; but 
he lived to be old, and was the only one of the 
race who died a natural death. Paul, a prisoner, 
accused by the Jews of many crimes against their 
law and religion, is permitted to appear before 
this king Herod Agrippa to plead his cause. Ever 
faithful to the interests of his great mission, he 
fails not, while pleading for himself, to plead for 
Christ and his gospel. We have his appeal on 
record, and we know how earnest and eloquent 
it was. Agrippa was moved. His Roman indif- 
ference and Jewish stubbornness were shaken. 
"Almost thou persuadest me to.be a Christian," 
he says. Paul replies as in the text. The reply 
unites the adroitness of an advocate and the maj- 
esty of an Apostle : " I would to God that thou," 
— but he was a subject and would be courteous, 
and therefore he says, — "I would to God that 
not only thou, but also all that hear me this day, 
were both almost and altogether such as I am, 



60 Almost and Altogether. 

except," — and here he spread out his manacled 
hands, as it were in appeal to their justice and their 
sympathy, — " except these bonds," these fetters. 
He would wish them no evil, no discomfort nor 
disgrace, — polite and kindly always. And yet 
for a man in his condition, hated, hunted, accused 
of crime, a helpless prisoner, a member of a de- 
spised sect everywhere put down, — for him, ad- 
dressing those royal personages, the grandees 
of the court in their lordly estate, — for him to 
dare to say in the tone of kindness, that he wished 
for them the honor and happiness of being such 
as he was, a Christian ! Was it not impudent pre- 
sumption, that air of superiority ? He superior to 
them ? and in affecting to wish them well, wishing 
they were such as he ? Will they not have him 
scourged out of their presence for the mocking 
insult ? Not at all. It does not appear that they 
took offense, but the king spoke favorably of his 
cause immediately after. No, he was their supe- 
rior, and he felt it, and they felt it for the time. 
The words that he spoke, the great truth that 
filled and inspired him, the spiritual courage, 
confidence, and hope that animated him set him 
aloft, and they, from their low condition of men- 
tal darkness and earthly pride, looked up to him. 
Even the king sat affected, humbled, and rebuked 
in the presence of one so much greater and higher 
than himself. Paul in his chains was the greatest 
presence there, and silently confessed for such. 
The nobleness and majesty of a soul strong in 
truth and the right, and wearing the regalia of 



Almost and Altogether. 61 

great thoughts, always vindicate themselves and 
attest their own preeminence. The splendor of 
earthly royalty pales before them. There was no 
impudence or insult in the Apostle's wish ; he 
spoke down to them, as he needs must from his 
higher position ; he invited them up to his side, 
and his words sounded to them for the moment 
like the gracious condescension of a superior, and 
a benediction from above. He was the true king 
at that sitting and bore himself like what he was, 
and they were awed down to their proper place. 
The day before they might have scorned such hu- 
miliation • the day after they may have remem- 
bered it with mortification ; but in that present 
hour their own souls' deep consciousness com- 
pelled them to look up to their superior and let 
him condescend to them. 

But the text suggests another point which I 
especially wish to present to you. " Almost thou 
persuadest me," said Agrippa. Paul saw the fatal 
short-coming of that word, almost. He would 
take little or no encouragement from it, does not 
exult as if anything had been gained to his good 
cause, does not pause to congratulate the king 
on his accession to the side of truth and holiness. 
He knew that almost amounted to nothing, and 
so he instantly says, " I would that thou wert not 
only almost, but altogether a Christian." And 
this little dialogue of two sentences between the 
Apostle and the king may be found full of a moral 
instruction for us, and it should lead us to con- 
sider adequately the vast difference there is in all 



62 



Almost and Altogether. 



matters of religious conviction and moral decision 
between almost and altogether, and between the 
two states of mind and character which they sev- 
erally indicate. 

In all human affairs that word almost connects 
itself, whether in the great things of history or 
the small ones of common life, with the uncounted 
and ever-recurring instances of failure and defeat, 
disappointment and mortification, baffled pros- 
pects and evil issues. So constantly are men 
coming close upon great and desirable results, 
but not quite up to them, just missing them ■ so 
many risings against tyranny have almost suc- 
ceeded but not quite, and have left it stronger 
than ever; so many victories have been almost 
won, but just missed, and become total defeats ; 
so many men have almost achieved some great 
thing, but stopped just short of it and done noth- 
ing and sunk into insignificance ; so many men in 
places of power and influence have almost made 
up their minds, and taken their stand for some 
great principle or measure that would have 
changed the aspect of the world and the course 
of history, but have faltered at the last stage and 
fallen away into nothing at all. There is no na- 
tion but has, at some point of its history, almost 
taken a stand or done a deed that would have 
reversed its subsequent history ; no conqueror 
but has been almost conquered; no victim but 
has almost triumphed. How many are the ad- 
ventures of world-wide importance that have al- 
most succeeded, but not quite, and so passed into 



Almost and Altogether. 63 

nothingness and oblivion. How many men may 
we suppose before Newton and Copernicus ar- 
rived almost at the discovery, — within a hair's 
breadth of it, — of the law of gravitation and of 
the movement of the heavenly bodies, but not 
quite, and therefore have never been heard of. 
Whenever any great discovery or invention is hit 
upon, we cannot think what numbers of minds 
had arrived at the very verge of it, over and over, 
and long before. How many men have been 
almost great orators, great poets, or statesmen, 
or warriors, with all the gifts and opportunities 
to make them such except for some single and 
trivial physical infirmity or mental defect, or 
some little mistake or untoward circumstance, 
and, through that small exception have failed en- 
tirely of success and renown. 

And in more personal affairs, when from amid 
disappointed hopes and unhappy circumstances 
we look back and contemplate the brighter pros- 
pects and happier possibilities that once lay be- 
fore us, we cannot but see how near we have 
often come to a better lot, and almost touched 
the goal of our desires, and the almost seemed 
then but the least space separating us from that 
goal ; but we see now that that nearness was no 
better for us than a thousand miles of distance. 

But we must not permit these worldly reflec- 
tions to detain us any longer from the points more 
akin to that which Paul pressed upon Agrippa. 
It is in the moral and spiritual affairs of individ- 
ual minds that this fatal almostness, so flattering 



64 Almost and Altogether. 

in its promise and so treacherous and humiliating 
in its results, exhibits itself most frequently and 
mournfully. When, in our seasons of humble and • 
regretful retrospection, we think how far short , 
we have come of what was possible to us of a 
blameless, useful, and noble life, and how far char- 
acter falls below the soul's own acknowledged 
standard, and how poor is the result and outcome 
of all our young opportunities and capabilities, — 
what thoughtful man does not remember whole 
hosts of good deeds which from time to time he 
has almost done, that if done would have been to 
him an exceeding wealth of righteousness, — and 
right decisions which many a time he has been 
upon the point of making, so as to feel quite sure 
that he should make them, and only faltered 
strangely, he knows not how, at the last moment 
and in the single final word, — decisions which, 
if he had made absolutely, would have given to 
his whole career a noble direction, — and high 
inspirations of virtue which poured in upon him 
from above, and seemed to take possession of 
him and lift him up into the mount, and almost 
became the very law and spirit of his being and ( 
activity, and would have redeemed him and 
shaped him anew, but that somehow they began 
to fade just at the moment of their promised 
consummation? and the recollection of his fail- 
ures and neglects is the more bitter for the 
thought of these frequent close approaches to a 
better way and condition. 

Of worldly disappointments the most torment- 



Almost and Altogether. 65 

ing are those in which we have to think of the 
prizes of life which we once had within our grasp, 
and might have put forth the hand and made 
them our own, and just then, through some fee- 
bleness or thoughtlessness, let them slip from us 
and depart. Or the times when we were just 
ready and perfectly able to set our foot on the 
promised land of our desires and hopes, and 
should have possessed it unalterably, when some 
chance influence or weak indecision lured or 
turned our steps aside, and it was lost forever. 
It is a keen misery to have failed just at the very 
point of possible and assured success. And in 
the high moral issues of life it deepens humilia- 
tion and sharpens the sting of remorse for our 
failings and short-comings, to call to mind those 
frequent crises when we almost made the choice, 
or took the step that would have set us aloft and 
spared us so much loss and lapsing and shame. 
How strange and sad it seems that our wisdom 
and our strength should have so failed us in those 
critical moments when it needed so little more, 
almost nothing more, to have set all right and 
made all safe. The most fallen men, fallen low- 
est in intemperance, profligacy, unprincipled deal- 
ing, moral imbecility, social infamy, spiritual dead- 
ness, — whenever conscience and memory arouse 
themselves they cannot but think with great an- 
guish of those most favored seasons of their ex- 
perience when they had light and power and high 
hope and an open way and favorable influences, 
when they almost sheltered themselves within the 
5 



66 Almost and Altogether. 

very ark of the Lord, and can only wonder now, 
with sharp and unavailing regret, how it was they 
missed it, and why they did not make the one 
last effort, or persevere in it the little moment 
longer that was requisite. They who are fallen 
lowest remember the heights of virtue, honor, and 
peace, whose shining they once beheld, and whose 
pinnacle they once almost touched. And are we 
not all in some sense and some degree fallen ? 
Who is what he feels he might have been, and 
what these years of gracious opportunity should 
have made him ? Who does not look up, and 
look back from his present state, to some better 
aspirations that he was once on the point of real- 
izing, and some nobler vows that he once almost 
made and almost kept? Who has not been so 
near to becoming his own truer and better self, 
taking his right place, entering upon his right 
work, and mounting to his appropriate range of 
principles and motives, so near to it as to feel 
ready sometimes to lie down prostrate in the 
ashes, with humiliation and repentance, and cry, 
" God be merciful to me a sinner ? " 

When Paul, with his keen insight and moral dis- 
crimination, saw that Agrippa was deeply moved, 
and heard him say he was almost persuaded, and 
saw the powers of truth and error, of good and 
evil, balancing themselves in his disturbed mind, 
saw that he was almost persuaded, he saw also, 
what he had seen in a thousand others, and what 
he had probably seen in his own past experience, 
— though he was the sort of man, we should think, 



Almost and Altogether. 67 

to have had fewer experiences of that kind than 
almost anybody, — he saw, I say, in his royal 
auditor, how utterly delusive and futile that almost 
persuasion was. And we are but dull learners in 
the school of experience if we have not learned 
the treacherous fallacy of all hopes based on con- 
victions not quite decided, intentions not quite 
fulfilled, positions not firmly assumed, strong feel- 
ings not quite erected into laws of the soul and 
principles of action. The dividing space between 
almost and altogether often looks very narrow, 
but as often it is a wide untraveled sea ; as often 
it is a great fixed gulf, on the edge of which men 
pause and shrink from the one necessary leap, 
and lose all the way they have laboriously trav- 
eled up to it, — a gulf deep and broad enough to 
receive and hold a universe full of baffled expec- 
tations and broken vows. It is the sepulchre of 
half the world's brave and good intents. It is a 
gulf that smokes with the fires of remorseful mem- 
ory, and resounds with the wailings of troubled 
consciences and blighted hopes and comfortless 
retrospections. 

To bridge over or to close up this fatal chasm 
between the almost and the altogether as it 
yawned there in the halting mind of Agrippa, was 
the one thought of Paul when he replied to what 
seemed so great a concession, so encouraging a 
word, on the king's part. If he took any encour- 
agement from it it was disappointed. Agrippa 
stopped at the almost and never went farther; 
turned quite back, doubtless, as soon as the Apos- 



68 Almost and Altogether. 

tie had gone his way, and the sound of his voice 
had died away on the ear. It is but too com- 
monly so. Whenever one says, " I am almost 
convinced," "I almost wish," "I am almost re- 
solved upon this or that thing," there is but a 
very slight chance that anything will come of it. 
He may say it in all sincerity, and think that he 
really is on the point of consummating the wish 
or purpose ; but the very word almost indicates 
that he is pausing at that same chasm, hesitates 
at the critical moment, and will get no farther on. 
Whoso stops to congratulate himself upon the 
almost is in truth farther than ever from the alto- 
gether. What Paul prayed for in such abrupt 
earnestness in behalf of his one hearer, or that 
little court circle, the gospel which he proclaimed 
is ever striving to accomplish in behalf of us and 
all mankind, to get us across that chasm which 
we are so frequently coming up to, and prevent 
our halting there under the fatal delusion that 
a goal is as good as reached when it is almost 
reached. 

Every reader of the New Testament must have 
remarked how absolute it is in its requirements, 
— how positive, thorough-going, uncompromising 
in the spirit of its commands. It never abates a 
jot of its high requisitions, never brings down its 
standard of holiness to meet us half way, or com- 
pound with us for any short-coming ; attaches but 
little value to any partial faith, but requires a be- 
lieving with the whole heart ; countenances no 
exceptions to the law of rectitude and purity, ad- 



Almost and Altogether. 69 

mits no reservations in the soul's allegiance to 
the right and the divine, proposes nothing less 
than the soul's unqualified self-devotion to things 
excellent and obligatory, — claims the entire 
heart's fealty ; this is the characteristic of the 
Christian religion, and it may seem a rigid and 
merciless one, not accommodating itself suffi- 
ciently to our infirmities, and all the conflicting 
circumstances of our position in the world, — too 
exacting, too uncompromising. But not so. All 
this is simply a clear-sighted recognition of the 
almost infinite difference between the half and 
the whole ; aye, and between ninety-nine hun- 
dredths and the whole, between the almost and 
the altogether. The gospel wants to form in 
man a positive and decisive character ; it wants 
to supply that one link so often missing, between 
aspiration and execution, between desire and its 
realization, between purpose and performance, 
between faith and a life of faith, between effort 
and success in every noble aim. It would save 
us from being flattered and deceived by mere 
good feeling and good intents which so love to 
play around good deeds and see how near they 
can come to them without touching them. It 
would make men something positively and con- 
sistently, and enable them in their self-judgments 
to see what they are actually, and not almost, to 
bridge for us that same gulf between the almost 
and the altogether. Would God it might do so \ 
we might well pray for ourselves Paul's prayer 
for Agrippa. We know in how many things and 



JO Almost and Altogether. 

how often we need to take that last step, but fail 
to take it ; and while we think we have as good 
as accomplished the journey, might, in fact, about 
as well never have started at all. Our half faiths 
do not accomplish for us the ends of faith. Half 
resolutions are little better than none ; to be al- 
most persuaded results in nothing but to be har- 
dened against so deep an impression even as that 
the next time the influence returns. In the moral 
concerns of life, " almost " is a mental anodyne 
and a great heart-hardener. To be almost a 
Christian avails little more for the soul's salva- 
tion than to be quite an infidel or a heathen. 

It is our high spiritual business of self-educa- 
tion to abolish this fatal almost, and not let it be 
such an habitual stopping-place and point of re- 
turn, but to pass by it, and, without halting, take 
the one step more \ to cultivate and practice en- 
tireness of right persuasion, absoluteness of right 
decisions and moral resolutions, singleness of 
heart, completeness of just purposes ; the spirit 
that goes the whole length of every right way, and 
springs to the very goal of holy desire, and de- 
votes itself in total unreservedness to the great 
aims of existence, so as to be and to do, not only 
almost, but altogether, what the will of God and 
the better promptings of the heart, and all the 
interests of life and the soul's present dignity and 
peace and everlasting welfare demand of us to 
do and to be. 

1856. 



VI. 



TEKEL. 

And this is the writing that was written : MENE, MENE, TEKEL, 
UPHARSIN. — Daniel v. 25. 

Thou art weighed in the balances and art found wanting. — Daniel 
v. 27. 

THESE words sound to us strange and mean- 
ingless, and they looked so to the doomed 
monarch who was bidden to read them on his 
palace wall at Babylon. The chapter in Daniel 
from which the text is taken, illustrated as it has 
often been by the artists, has made the story of 
Belshazzar familiar. He appears to have been 
a dissolute and irreligious king, unfaithful to his 
great stewardship of power from the King of 
kings. Misgovernment, sensuality, and all moral 
abandonment had enervated his empire, and its 
dissolution was approaching. His own bad ca- 
reer was hastening to its close ; the measure of 
his iniquity was full ; it was too late to retrieve 
himself "; the downward course of things could 
not be changed ; the ruin was too near its con- 
summation to be checked. And even if the com- 
ing events had not been beyond human control, 
he had lost the desire and the moral power, it is 
likely, to turn the engulfing tide. With the reck- 
lessness and desperation which are but too nat- 



72 



Tekel. 



ural and too common under such circumstances, 
he prepared a banquet of unusual splendor. He 
would drown thought, he would defy fate • he 
would keep up the semblance of power and glory, 
and, amid festive excitements and a regal mag- 
nificence, cheat himself and others with the shows 
of grandeur and security. To signalize his dar- 
ing defiance of Heaven, he brought the golden 
vessels of religion from their sanctuary to grace 
his impious feast with the sacrilege. And there 
he sat with his magnificent court in voluptuous 
abandonment. Who so great, so proud, so happy, 
to all outward seeming, as he and his ? 

But under that defiant attitude there were se- 
cret misgivings ; amid the notes of revelry there 
were inarticulate whispers of the gathering storm, 
— a shadow, unrecognized, but chill and dark- 
ening, had fallen on all those hearts, which no 
height of mirth could quite dispel. The hour of 
doom was about to strike, and that stroke never 
comes without some secret sense of warning pre- 
ceding it. One uninvited guest would come in, 
in spite of royal prohibitions, and sit down at the 
table, and even lean heavily on the royal bosom, 
ignored but not to be expelled, — and that was 
fear, — a certain fearful looking for judgment to 
come. It was a time for portents, and a portent 
came. Any one of those drunken and slumbering 
consciences, suddenly awaking, roused by an over- 
mastering sense of guilt and danger, would have 
sufficed to bring it in, and it came, the portent. 
It was the king's smitten conscience and boding 



Tekel. 



73 



heart that brought it in, and endowed it with sub- 
stance and form. He saw it amid the glancing 
lights and shadows on the wall ; he saw some- 
thing, as it were part of a man's hand moving 
there, as though it were writing something. He 
alone saw it so far as appears from the narrative, 
— but he saw it. What was it, and what did it 
mean, he demanded ? for he could not withdraw 
his eyes, he could not see or think of anything 
else. What was it, and the interpretation of it ? 
he demanded, like one who knew not what it was 
to be disobeyed. None could tell. Probably 
none but he saw anything peculiar, or if they felt 
within themselves any of the guilty fears which 
they read in his blanched countenance, it would 
not have been courtly to express them, and they 
were dumb. But he could not be put off, and 
he sent for his learned men ; but they could not 
see what the spectral hand wrote, nor, probably, 
whether it wrote anything. All their science was 
at fault, and they could answer nothing. Then 
the queen, seeing that the king could not be put 
off, advised him to send for the Hebrew captive, 
Daniel, a wise man, of an excellent spirit and 
knowledge, she said. And he came, and was 
commanded to interpret the omen, with the prom- 
ise of great reward. He scouted the reward, but 
he was ready to interpret. He knew what the 
writing was, or what it ought to have been if there 
had been any. We are not told that there were 
any visible words written, but only a part of a 
hand writing, that is, making a motion as if writ- 



74 



TekeL 



ing. If there had been visible words the king 
could have read them himself, or if not he, his 
wise men could. But Daniel could interpret the 
moving hand ; he knew what should have been 
written. He could read it in the frightened look 
and quaking form of the conscience-stricken king. 
He could read it in the voluptuous scene around 
him, the type of a sensual reign, a corrupt ad- 
ministration and a dissolving state. He was a 
prophet of the Lord, and he knew what the writ- 
ing should be because he knew that that royal 
career had been one continuous insult to the holy 
God, and a breaking of all the laws of eternal 
right and sacred duty. He saw about him all 
the signs of a crumbling dynasty and a closing 
life. Voices of judgment were ringing in his ear 
through all the polluted air. He knew the pur- 
port of those unwritten words, and he dared to 
speak it, and he alone, not those wise men and 
soothsayers, — if they had known what to say they 
would have said nothing. They were courtiers, 
and not accustomed to speak unwelcome words 
in the ear of despotism ; but the prophets of Is- 
rael were not men of a stamp to tremble before 
kings, or stand dumb in the presence of any 
earthly majesty. They were bold, bold even unto 
death for God and his righteousness. And there 
the brave man stood. You may have seen him 
as represented in the picture of a great artist, — 
or if not that, you can imagine him as the narra- 
tive represents him. He is the true king in the 
scene. On his brow, in his form, you see the real 



Tekel. 



75 



majesty of the piece. Truth and courage make 
him more than regal. He alone trembles not 
with any heart-sinking. All eyes and ears wait 
upon him with reverent dread. He will not spare 
them, — they were stern men, those old prophets. 
He was prompt to answer : " Let thy gifts be to 
thyself, and give thy rewards to another, yet I 
will read the writing unto the king, and make 
known to him the interpretation." And then he 
proceeds with a brief summary of the affairs of 
the kingdom, relates to the king the iniquities of 
his father before him, and then his own. Thou 
has lifted up thyself against the Lord of heaven ; 
and the God in whose hand thy breath is, and 
whose are all thy ways, thou hast not glorified, 
and therefore this hand has appeared to thee 
writing. It is the forerunner of thy doom ; it 
comes in response to thy guilty conscience, to 
proclaim the divine condemnation upon thee. 
And this is the writing that was written, — words 
which thou couldst not see, but I will declare to 
thee, this, — " Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin." 
These words put into English would be thus : 
" Numbered, weighed, to be divided," or " de- 
stroyed." Dreadful announcement of a dreadful 
doom ! It was as if Jehovah had spoken through 
the lips of his prophet. There was no protest, no 
appeal. The guilty heart bowed in compulsory 
and unresisting acquiescence. That was the true 
interpretation, and all knew it. Those words, if 
not written there on the wall, stood visibly written 
on the king's brow, and amid all the mockeries of 



7 6 



Tekel. 



that impious feast. They were stamped all over 
the fated city and kingdom ; the fiery letters 
glared out in the sky like a decree of God, as 
they were read and recognized of all men as soon 
as they were spoken. That very night they were 
verified in the death of Belshazzar and the dis- 
ruption of his empire. 

The fate of a profligate and impious king, in 
that old time, and the political fortunes of an 
empire that passed away so long ago, are of no 
interest to us, and I should not have brought 
them to notice, were it not that in that festive 
scene, the crisis of a king's and a nation's fall, 
the inspired prophet proclaimed an eternal prin- 
ciple of the divine government over men, and a 
law of God that stands unchanged through all 
the ages, and is executed for weal or woe in every 
soul of man. This principle, considered as a 
universal principle, stands expressed in the sec- 
ond word of that awful handwriting. Tekel — 
" thou art weighed in the balances " — as much 
as to say : O king, while thou hast been glorying 
in thy power and pomp, and rioting in thy self- 
indulgence, and drinking in the sweet draughts 
of flattery, and saying in thy self-sufficiency : 
" Behold how great and strong I am ! " all the 
time God has been weighing thee in his secret 
balance. Slowly He has adjusted the beam, and 
patiently He has waited to see if thou wouldst be 
a true man • to see if there was worth in thee ; 
any solidity beneath the shining exterior ; any 
fidelity to thy position ; any obedience to the law 



Tekel. 



77 



that is higher than thine own. He has waited 
and watched, but in vain. Thou art found want- 
ing. The beam has been going up slowly, surely, 
until now, till it strikes, and the weighing is done, 
and thou art judged. The decree has gone out : 
" Wanting, empty, worthless ; thy kingdom is 
taken from thee ; thine earthly probation is ended. 
The accumulating providences have gathered to a 
head against thee, and this night settles the ac- 
count. Weighed — weighed, and wanting ! " 

All men are weighed. It is a process forever 
going on with respect to every man. All hol- 
lowness and falseness is detected and exposed. 
There is no concealment or impunity for any sin. 
We may deceive ourselves with our own false 
pretensions, but the scales of God are unerring, 
and always hang poised for our weighing. There 
is not always a prophet at our side with the in- 
spiration and the courage to declare the fearful 
tally; but God makes it known to us, and we can 
read it off if we will. In several ways it is made 
manifest how our accounts stand in the scales of 
God. First, there are external and physical indi- 
cations. Some sins are a direct breaking of God's 
natural laws, and these, with some others, have 
their physical penalties, — outward signs and con- 
sequences of our transgression and short-coming. 
There are many bodily sicknesses and pains, 
worldly woes and calamities and disappointments 
that come in judgment of sin, — the natural laws 
avenging themselves upon the breaker of them. 
A great deal that we suffer in the world is the 



78 



TekeL 



result, direct or indirect, of our law-breaking un- 
faithfulness to our position and our duty. Un- 
happy providences gather round and follow after 
our evil deeds and neglects, and indicate palpably 
the weighing and the wanting. But this is not 
a sure, a complete, or a sufficient tally. Events 
often delay in their coming ; they are determined 
by many other causes than human merit or blame • 
they are not always a retribution, but sometimes 
only a chastening. And there are many sins of 
such a nature that they break no physical laws, 
and bring no physical penalties. There are ways 
of ungodliness that are perfectly compatible with 
health and all outward prosperity and enjoyment. 
The events that befall us do but partially inter- 
pret the unseen writing on the wall. 

There is another interpretation of it given in 
the moral judgments of mankind. The world 
weighs us. Every man is weighed by his friends 
and enemies, his neighbors, the community, pos- 
terity, — a larger or a smaller circle, according to 
the sphere he occupies. And this is a part of 
God's weighing, because the judgments of men, 
so far as they are enlightened and honest, pro- 
ceed from those attributes which He possesses in 
perfection, and a limited endowment of which he 
has bestowed upon his children. It is an imper- 
fect judgment, liable to mistakes and delays, 
liable to be warped by prejudice and to be cor- 
rupted in many ways ; and yet, on the whole, and 
in the long run, it is deep-searching, and fearfully- 
just. The false man gets marked and becomes 



Tekel. 



79 



an object of distrust. Empty pretension, swell 
and flaunt as it may, is seen through at length, 
be it ever so solid looking. It is difficult for a 
man to pass long for more than he is, or other 
than he is. Men do track out the wrong-doer 
with a terrible persistency, and usually run him 
down at last, and bring him to the light and 
punish him with their laws or their hatred or their 
scorn. The mask of hypocrisy and deceit gets 
worn and torn amid the rough ways of the world. 
Ill-gotten gain becomes, even to human eyes, but 
a shining badge of dishonor, a standing witness 
of the sin. The sensual vices plant a disgusting 
look upon the face, and whoso runs may read it, 
and read it never with respect, always with loath- 
ing. Is there cold-heartedness, selfishness, mean- 
ness in a man ? all hearts instinctively discern its 
hateful presence, and in God's stead, and almost 
with his unerringness, weigh it, and mark it for 
what it is. An Apostle has said it is a small thing 
to be judged of man's judgment. And so it is 
a small thing when that judgment is perverted, 
hasty, and opposed to God's judgment ; but when 
it is a just judgment, and agrees with God's judg- 
ment, then it is a great thing, and a terrible thing. 
It is an interpretation of the higher judgment; 
it is a foreshadowing of the judgment to come. 
The human heart has instincts that enable it, 
with an unreasoning sagacity, to pronounce be- 
forehand the decrees of God, and follow the 
mysterious hand that writes upon the wall. The 
heartfelt, the deliberate, the average condemna- 



8o 



TekeL 



tion of one's fellow-men is dreadfully sincere, and 
has a frightful tone of finality in it. What Daniel 
was to Belshazzar, such are all good and right- 
minded and plain-spoken men to every evil-doer. 
There are prophets still all over the world, — not 
with the name or bearing of a prophet, but their 
consenting words and thoughts of moral judgment 
have the same divine authority in them, the same 
voice of doom in them. Do your neighbors look 
upon you with distrust? Do your friends fall 
away from you, and good men have fears for you ? 
Is your wife sad and foreboding about you ? Do 
your children, loving you, wonder at your ways ? 
or, fearing and hating you, wish you out of their 
way, or themselves out of yours ? Is it so ? Then 
examine yourself. It may be that you are mis- 
judged and ill-used ; but it looks more as if these 
hearts, so pained and alienated, were the ap 
pointed balances in which God is weighing you, 
and will find you wanting. 

But this human judgment is, after all, but a 
partial and fallible tally of the divine weighing. 
It may judge us too harshly or too leniently. 
Like outward providences, it is but a proximate 
expression of the exact justice of God. The 
truest register of the divine weighing is in the 
soul itself.- The moral laws of God are executed 
within. When a man is weighed and found 
wanting, his heaviest punishment consists in the 
wanting — the not having and the not being — 
that which is essential to the dignity and enjoy- 
ment of existence. When purity, worth, honor, 



Tekel. 



81 



rectitude, and love are gone out of the soul, there 
is no need of further punishment. The wrath of 
God is complete in the mere absence of these 
things. There is vacancy, coldness, hollowness 
within, with aching regrets, bitter memories, 
shame and fear, the sense of a wasted life, the 
blankness of the future prospect, and there is 
nothing that can add much to the sharpness of 
this penalty, — to be found wanting, to have come 
short, — unfaithfulness, waste, internal death. 
The good affections, the sense of God, the great 
hopes, the great satisfactions of being, perished 
away. Wanting — all guilt, uselessness, worth- 
lessness resolves itself into that. Weighed and 
wanting. 

And this method of the divine judgment is un- 
erring and complete. There hangs the quick, 
sure, everlasting balance. We must all mount 
that swinging scale, — nay, we are in it from first 
to last, poised, weighed. The result is subject to 
no mistake. Earthly prosperities and adversities 
are but slight make-weights that quickly disap- 
pear. In this weighing, appearances are not 
reckoned, — the inner reality alone tells. The 
man is weighed, not the accidents of his life, not 
even his actions, but himself, — thou, thou art 
weighed in the balances ! In God's eye we pass 
for what we are, and only that. We cannot be 
more or less. We cannot weight the scales, nor 
bind down the beam, nor wrest it from its pivot, 
nor alter the score. A fearful weighing! And 
the hand comes out on the wall to write down 
6 



82 



Tekel. 



the results. The conscience sees it. All the 
law and the prophets, with one voice, interpret 
it j all experience verifies it. Whoso is wanting 
will find it written there simply, — " Wanting " — 
"Tekel." It is the doom of dooms. " Weighed," 
— it is the law of laws. 

But the working of this great law is not merely 
awful in its exactness and solemn in its warnings. 
It is also comforting and full of encouragement. 
The weighing is really just, — thank God for that 
assurance ! It takes into account the things 
which the world cannot see, the good no less 
than the evil, that is hidden from earthly eyes. 
God looketh upon the heart, and every good feel- 
ing that throbs there, though it be without an 
adequate expression ; every holy desire that fails 
of visible accomplishment, every just purpose 
that gets hindered, every secret repentance, every 
hidden tear, is known to God, and goes into the 
balance. He takes no technical advantage of his 
children. He considereth our infirmities, He re- 
membereth that we are dust. He knows every 
circumstance of abatement and extenuation. His 
eye pierces beyond the action to the inmost mo- 
tive. There is a hidden worth and beauty in 
many a heart where the world cannot see it ; but 
God sees it and weighs it. He does not stand 
by the stream, but at the fountain. The good we 
mean, though it be not done, if it be in our hearts 
to do it, in his sight it is done and weighed. 
The prayer that is not spoken in men's hearing 
obtains access to his ear. If, when we are worse 



Tekel. 



83 



than we seem, He notes it, so also, in so far as 
we are better than we seem, He notes that. He 
can see some hidden soul of goodness in those 
whom men cast out and condemn. Look to Jesus 
Christ, his son and representative on earth. 
Follow Him in his gentle, uplifting intercourse 
with the fallen and despised. Listen to his gra- 
cious words of good cheer, and catch his inspira- 
tions of comfort and hope, and learn how loving, 
as well as strict, are the judgments of God. Be 
glad that the final weighing is not man's, who 
knows so little, but God's who knows all. 

Reflect, then, with solemn dread, and yet with 
hopeful cheer, on this great weighing. The hand 
that comes out on the wall writes fearful words, 
yet not such always, nor for all ; words of peace, 
also, and great encouragement, — words of mercy 
as well as of judgment. There is a stern Daniel 
to interpret them for the guilty conscience ; but 
there is also a gentle Christ to interpret them to 
the tender and stricken heart. There is a voice 
in the universe that cries, "Woe, woe," to the 
wicked and unclean ; but there is another voice 
that cries, " Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, 
saith your God ; speak ye comfortably to Jerusa- 
lem."" 

1858. 



VII. 



CHRISTIAN MANLINESS-DOING AND STAND- 
ING. 

And having done all, to stand. — Ephesicms vi. 13. 

I TAKE this language as indicating the method 
and characteristics of a true Christian manli- 
ness. Nobody was ever more competent than 
Paul to deliver precepts and furnish texts on 
that subject. He was himself so brave and true, 
and strong and patient, could act with so much 
vigor and endure with so much heroism ; so erect 
in self-respect, yet so piously humble of heart ; 
so eminently manly, and yet so tenderly and 
meekly Christian, that we might take him as the 
type of a Christian manliness ; and none ever 
spoke, better worth listening to, when he points 
out and inculcates the traits that constitute it. 
We have presented here, in the text, one phase, 
and that a most comprehensive one, of the manly 
character, according to his conception of it. We 
will hold it up to our own view a while, if possi- 
bly by the contemplation of it we may rise up 
and grow into a better appreciation of it. 

Having done all, to stand. Putting these words 
into a fitting paraphase, the Apostle seems to say 



Christian Manliness. 



85 



to us : Do your best in any matter which you 
have to do with, and then calmly abide the issue. 
Use your best faculties and your best light, to 
get at the truth in matters that concern you, and 
having done that in all diligence and good faith, 
respect your own convictions, declare them boldly, 
and abide by them firmly. Do your whole duty 
in any exigency, and then keep yourself clear of 
all nervous anxiety about the consequences. 
Perform your part in any work that falls to you, 
and tranquilly leave the rest to God. Secure a 
good conscience, make as sure as you can of the 
right, and having secured that, plant yourself on 
it, take your stand upon it, set down your foot 
and hold up your head, unconcerned as to what 
may come of it, — unmoved, unshaken, come of 
it what will. This is the interpretation of the 
text, and if we consider it well, and make full 
application of it to actual life, I do not see but it 
exhibits pretty fully the style of manliness that 
we would cultivate and acquire. We do not al- 
ways analyze it, or name it, but we do always 
render homage to it when we see it ; we feel the 
dignity of it, and see that it constitutes a grand 
superiority among men, makes a man verily a 
man, and that is a great character to attain to, 
and a rare one, too, in its completeness. We see 
nothing better than approximations to it, falling 
short of our idea, indeed, yet complete and noble 
enough to inspire reverence and excite emula- 
tion. 

You perceive there are two branches to this 



86 



Christian Manliness. 



sort of character, or two classes of constituent 
elements in it, each necessary to the other, and 
both necessary to the result ; and I know not in 
which there is most apt to be a deficiency, — they 
both seem equally difficult to attain. I suppose 
the difference is in persons, — some succeed or 
fail most in one, and others in the other, and yet 
there is no very good success in one without an 
equal success in the other. Certainly neither 
alone produces a very satisfactory style of man. 

A complete manliness, then, as our text exhib- 
its it, is of two parts, corresponding to what 
would be called, in natural philosophy, dynam- 
ics and statics, — the first consisting of moving 
forces, power in action, — the second of stability 
and equilibrium of mental position when the time 
of action is past, — a true standing still, poised 
by the laws of spiritual gravitation, strength in 
its reposing posture. This latter part, as it is 
more of the nature of a result, the final aspect 
and outcome of manliness, deserves to be con- 
sidered as the principal point in the character, 
while the other may be regarded, in philosophic 
language, as the fundamental condition prece- 
dent. The standing still is the last and highest 
position of man, only there must have been pre- 
viously strong activity, persistent and forceful 
movement, to enable him to stand so weightily, 
firmly, with dignity and ease. When an artist 
wishes to represent a great man, in marble or 
bronze, to stand for ages as the impersonation 
of his hero, he usually prefers to exhibit him 



Christian Manliness. 



87 



standing in an attitude of repose. He knows 
that a position of repose is the highest ; that that 
is manliness triumphant and crowned ; that man 
looks greater standing still than with his mus- 
cles on the stretch, in immediate action. But he 
knows, too, that he must make his marble man 
look as if he had a right to stand still, and as if 
he could stand so forever without being wearied 
in himself, or moved by another. He considers 
well where the vertical line through the centre of 
gravity will fall ; he studies the law of gravita- 
tion ; he is anxious to satisfy the eye with the 
appearance of perfect balance. The muscles are 
not in action, but he lets you see that they have 
been powerfully exercised, or else the man could 
not stand so, — so firm and with so much ease. 

The statue of Washington in the State House 
exhibits the father of his country standing repos- 
ingly, but in such a way that you can read in the 
posture and outline of each limb the evidence of 
a life of energetic activity, the story of all his 
battles, the crossing of rivers, the storming of 
forts, the shock of the charge. The face is tran- 
quil now, no trace of severe or troubled thought 
working beneath it ; the mind, you see, is stand- 
ing, as well as the body ; and yet, study the face 
and you shall read in its lines and surfaces a his- 
tory of all his campaignings and plannings and 
anxieties, his bitter disappointments and infi- 
nite perplexities and weary night-watchings ; the 
magistrate's earnest thought, the commander's 
sleepless vigilance, the mental intensities of a 



88 



Christian Manliness. 



war so long and great. That face could not 
stand there, beaming out from its niche upon the 
passing generations, so calm and strong, so ma- 
jestic and benignant, except as the result of such 
forceful and continuous action of the mind be- 
neath it. He could not stand so unless he had 
first done all. 

The statue of Franklin, standing there in the 
open square, — in face and figure and attitude it is 
the image of an easy, comfortable old man, stand- 
ing there just as it comes most natural to him, 
and as though he never would get tired. But the 
artist lets you know, — though he is careful that 
you shall not know how you know it, — that the 
man has moved, and moved to a purpose, through 
a long life-time. He has arrived at that posture 
by a noble and fruitful activity of more than 
three-score years. It is an easy thoughtfulness 
that sits now on that bare brow; but it is the 
tranquil wisdom wrought out of patient investi- 
gation, profound reflection, days and nights of 
mental toil and useful work, and never given over 
till it was done, and he had a right to put off the 
harness. He stands so still and easy, only be- 
cause he has won the right and achieved the 
power to stand so. If the man had not worked 
and moved laboriously, faithfully, through his 
working day, he could not look so tranquil and 
so stable. If truly represented, he would look 
as if the dignity were constrained and assumed, 
as if he would get tired, as if you could shove 
him from his majesty. He could not stand so 



Christian Manliness. 89 

well unless he had done well. The artist of real 
genius understands the moral and spiritual laws 
better, perhaps, than he is himself aware of. 

Thus it is in the daily exhibition of human 
character. Its highest, its crowning aspect, is 
that of a calm, firm standing still j but such a 
standing as has that about it which testifies to 
previous energetic movement and vigorous action 
long continued. In the realm of character, being 
is higher than doing, but it requires the doing 
to produce and establish it. But we must con- 
sider some of a man's standing postures more in 
detail. 

It is a part of manliness to stand firmly and 
full-fronted by one's convictions on any and all 
subjects, — to have settled opinions and declare 
them and adhere to them ; no timid hiding ; no 
vacillating shifts from one foot to the other ; no 
leaning and bending, now this way and now that, 
to catch the breeze of popular favor or shun the 
popular dissent ; not here to-day and to-morrow 
there, but in the same spot to-day and to-morrow 
and the next day. Not seeking to please every- 
body by agreeing with everybody in opinion, but 
to stand somewhere, and make it no secret where, 
— not in an aggressive attitude, but a firm one. 
This sort of standing has great manliness in it. 
The strength of it is visible ; it is felt ; there is 
weightiness in it, and a powerful composure and 
much respect waits upon it. But such a posture 
cannot be assumed at will. A man cannot say, 
" Here is an opinion or a side that is plausible 



go Christian Manliness. 

or desirable or effective, — go to, now, let us 
adopt and stand by it bravely." That will not 
be standing as the Apostle means the word ; it 
will only be sticking here or there ; not standing 
erect, plumb, self-poised, but drifted somewhere 
and lodged. And all men unconsciously see and 
estimate the difference of position. In order to 
stand in manly strength and uprightness in any 
intellectual position, and be seen to stand so, and 
to stand comfortably so, you must have earned 
the right and the power to stand so by previous 
and energetic action of the mind upon the sub- 
ject. You must have attained your convictions 
by laborious thought and patient investigation ; 
you must have arrived at them as the very truth ; 
you must, in adopting them, have maintained 
your intellectual veracity and disinterestedness 
for truth and right ; honor and conscience must 
have been taken into counsel ; you must know 
what you think and why you think it ; and see 
how you could not think otherwise without be- 
lieving a lie ; you must have done all that in you 
lies, as a faithful worker, to ascertain the true 
and the right. Then you can stand. Convic- 
tions so reached enable you to stand by them 
and in them, very firm, very composed, very 
weighty. And you will so stand that it will be 
obvious in your whole port that you have a right 
to stand, and will stand, let the winds blow as 
fiercely or diversely as they may, — upheld by the 
sure, the mighty, the eternal gravitation of the 
mental universe. But if you have come to your 



Christian Manliness. 



91 



opinions lightly and without labor, by mere ca- 
price or prejudice, or the popular current or for 
a selfish end, you may be ever so tenacious of 
them, and inflexible, yet it will not be standing, 
man-fashion, — a mere dogged bracing up, — no 
motion, to be sure, yet no repose. It will be seen 
that it is mere conceit, or pride, or laziness of 
mind ; a blind and stupid adherence, but not a 
standing. It is obvious you are no strong column 
gravitating to its firm pedestal of rock, but a light 
autumn leaf blown into its hole in the ground, 
and abiding there, to be sure, till all is perished, 
but only sodden in, stuck in the mire of its own 
decay. First, do all, and then, and only then, can 
you stand weightily as a man. 

It is the same with regard to the more practi- 
cal matter of fixedness of purpose. There is no 
manliness of character without fixed aims persist- 
ently pursued. There must be definite objects, 
there must be strong resolution, a will that refuses 
to be bent by any chance influence from abroad 
01 freak from within. You must have an unal- 
terable purpose ; thereby you stand and are a 
man, and not otherwise. Yet not certainly, even 
then. Whence came your aims and purposes ? 
Did you take them up accidentally ? merely float 
that way with the wind or tide ? form them with- 
out thoughtfulness ? with no regard to the ques- 
tion of their fitness or unfitness, worth or worth- 
lessness, rightfulness or wrongfulness, meanness 
or honorableness ? Is it so ? Then, however 
firmly you may seem to stand in them, it will not 



9 2 



Christian Manliness. 



be standing as the Apostle uses the word. It 
will be — and every eye will see it to be — mere 
obstinacy, willfulness, impracticableness, an af- 
fected posture, the result of conceit, of passion, 
of contradictoriness of spirit or indolence of char- 
acter, — a posture that gives you no ease and in- 
spires no respect, makes you disagreeable rather, 
and contemptible, as seeming to stand when you 
are only braced up. In order to a manly stand- 
ing in regard to your aims and purposes, you 
must first have done all to make sure that they 
are rational and wise, — you must have given the 
best exertion of your thought to the shaping of 
them. You must revere them as the well-ascer- 
tained laws and intents of God ; you must have 
squared them with the rule of right ; founded 
them on everlasting principles ; wrought them out 
with laborious reason, put into them your soul's 
whole sense of justice, and all the heart's inspira- 
tion of loving-kindness, — made them noble and 
Christian and pure. Then you can stand indeed • 
and a fixedness and persistency of resolve shall 
give you the aspect and reality of manly strength. 
You stand like a mountain on its base. Such a 
standing as glorious Paul would recognize, such 
as gives the soul a lofty repose and is a spectacle 
for man and angels to admire. You exhibit the 
highest attainment of earthly or heavenly art, 
namely, the greatest strength, long disciplined 
and practiced and thoroughly possessed, but in 
repose, and in repose the loftiest style of majesty 
and beauty. 



Christian Manliness. 



93 



There is a kind of standing that implies chiefly 
the power of endurance, and consists of fortitude 
and patience. To bear up bravely against the 
tide of adversity ; to meet disappointments with 
a cheerful equanimity ; to suffer wrong and not 
be brought under the sway of the angry and re- 
vengeful passions ; to suffer obloquy and not be 
disheartened or turned from the right ; to suffer 
pain and privation without a loss of tranquillity 
and trust; to be bereaved and afflicted, but not 
despairing; to be defeated, but not cast down 
nor broken in spirit, — that is a sublime posture. 
There is a beautiful and heroic manliness in that 
kind of standing. 

In some instances an apathetic temperament 
or a stoical disposition — cold, unimpressible and 
half alive — enables a person to stand so, or 
rather drops him down so, and he stays, imper- 
turbable, just where he drops, a lump of insensi- 
bility, resembling, not so much the statue that 
seems rooted to its base and held there by a just 
equipoise and a strong action of the limbs, but 
more like a bowlder, disengaged from the iceberg 
and tumbling on whither it may chance, till it gets 
embedded somewhere and inertly sticks there. 
But in general none can stand erect and strong 
under hard endurance, except through the invigo- 
ration of a preceding activity. They only can rest 
who have wrought. Manly stability only follows a 
manly energy. It is a grand and lovely sight for 
a man to stand contentedly in his lot when that 
lot is a hard, unfavored one, but he cannot stand 



94 



Christian Manliness. 



so in it, unless he can say in his heart, I did my 
best to shun it or make it better. Calamity may 
be borne with tranquil patience, but only if the 
sufferer can say, I did my best to avert it ; not 
through my neglect or inertness has it come, but 
by God's providence overruling my endeavors. 
A good conscience is the truest support and 
brings the manliest fortitude. To have done all 
is the best preparation for bearing all. The thing 
that most incapacitates us for bearing evil bravely 
and cheerfully is the ever-haunting reflection that 
we brought it upon ourselves or negligently let it 
come upon us. Do all your duty, and if trouble 
comes in consequence of it, or in spite of it, it 
finds you strengthened to meet it like a man. 
Faithful doing braces the soul for patient bear- 
ing. Act strongly when it is the time for action, 
and you can stand strong when there is nothing 
to do but to stand. The Apostle in this very 
connection bids us to take unto ourselves the 
whole armor of God, that we may withstand in 
the evil day, and having done all, to stand. The 
armor of God. He names it piece by piece, — 
shield, and shoes, and breastplate, and helmet, 
and sword, — covering and equipping the whole 
man. A most military description of moral out- 
fit and spiritual preparation, all designed to ena- 
ble and prepare us to stand. Every word of his 
charge breathes of energetic action. The armor 
is to be worn, — it is symbolic, every item of it, 
of the march and the battle. No mere idle dalli- 
ance or showy parade, but symbols of strength 



Christian Manliness. 95 

and perseverance in the fight. The armor is for 
doing, doing all, doing your best, and then you 
may stand, and can. No sentimentalism of a lux- 
urious piety ; no easy dreaming of faith ; no lazy 
and self-indulgent spiritual-mindedness, will an- 
swer to make you stand Christian-wise, man-wise, 
— but only the vigorous exercise of all your fac- 
ulties, a prompt seizing of all your opportunities, 
the doing of all your duties, the struggle and the 
work of a faithful, useful life. These alone knit 
up the moral sinews of the mind and produce a 
man, such as can stand. 

For the purpose of distinguishing the two parts 
of manliness, I have spoken of the doing as if it 
all preceded the standing in the order of time ; 
as if one were wholly a previous preparation, and 
the other wholly a final result, — but in fact, in 
actual life, the two parts are intermixed, — there 
is occasion for both together or alternately. The 
doing is never over, the standing is never final. 
All we can say is, that we sometimes contemplate 
a Christian man under one aspect and sometimes 
under the other, as occasion may chance ; and he 
himself feels at one moment the glow of action, 
and at another stability and repose, — the stand- 
ing still. Still, the spiritual order is such as I 
have designated, — work before rest, duty before 
patience, battle before peace, fidelity before con- 
tentment, doing well before standing well. 

This combination and interchange of the two 
great human functions I have called manliness, 
but not in such a sense as to exclude women 



9 6 



Christian Manliness, 



from sharing it. It is just as much true woman- 
liness. It is the soul of man or woman discharg- 
ing its two great offices, marching and halting, 
doing and enduring ■ energetic in action, but 
placid in contentment ; obeying God's command- 
ment vigorously and bearing his will meekly and 
gently ; wearing the armor of God for the conflict 
of life, and yet nestling softly in his bosom ; in- 
domitable will coupled with tenderness of heart ; 
force, giving place in its time to stillness, and 
both alike perfect through the strength that is in 
them. Force and weight, force and equipoise, 
firmness of position with vigor of advance. Such 
is the Christian manliness which St. Paul ex- 
pressed in these words of the text and embodied 
in his noble life. We want it, and it is so com- 
prehensive in its attributes that it seems as if 
we wanted nothing else. Cultivate it, and in both 
its parts. Seek it in its completeness. Where 
you witness it in life behold the grandeur of it, 
and give it your reverence, and the beauty of it, 
and give it your love. All truth and all right, 
all God's spirit and man's energy, all the intel- 
lect and all the heart, go to the composition of 
it. It is individual nobleness, the strength of 
states, and the hope of the world. It acts and 
it stands conspicuous all through the course of 
Paul's apostleship. It shines out in the Christ 
in that wilderness conflict, on the hills of Galilee, 
in the temple at Jerusalem, in the confronting of 
the judgment-hall, in the garden, on the cross. 
Manliness all, and that the noblest and divinest ; 



Christian Manliness. 



97 



now the one part of it and now the other ; now 
a doing, and again a standing ; separated to 
thought, but inseparable in character, both blend- 
ing in the even tenor of a Christian's life, and 
culminating in the triumph and peacefulness of a 
Christian's death. 
1858. 

7 



VIII. 



GO QUICKLY. 

And go quickly, and tell his disciples that He is risen from the dead. — 
Matt, xxviii. 7. 

THIS was said to the Marys, when they had 
come at the dawn to the grave of Jesus, 
and had found it open and empty, and the angel 
from heaven sitting upon the stone. The angel 
explained to them what had taken place, spoke * 
gently to them, soothed their fears, showed them 
the vacant grave, made them familiar with the 
astounding event, and then sent them away, bid- 
ding them go quickly, and tell the great news to 
his disciples, and how He was going before them 
into Galilee, and they would meet Him there, and 
be with Him again. " Go quickly," said the an- 
gel. And why so quickly ? How came that word 
upon the lips of the calm angel ? What need of 
haste ? The news would keep, and would be as 
good an hour, a day, a week hence, as at that mo- 
ment. The event of the resurrection was for all 
time ; it concerned all the future generations, and 
was to stand as the symbol of man's life and im- 
mortality as long as birth and death and burial 
should continue. It was not to be the wonder 



Go Quickly, 



99 



of a day, but the good news that should be for- 
ever new and forever good ; a joy and a hope that 
should grow brighter and fuller with the passage 
of time, and never cease out of the human heart. 
Why should those women run so fast to tell it, 
and an angel bid them do it, to anticipate the nat- 
ural pace of rumor by a few minutes or hours, and 
to hurry the telling of it to a dozen men, when the 
millions who were concerned just as much were 
waiting the slow progress of the generations and 
the march of the centuries to learn it? Why that 
word of haste ? 

Let us put the simplest construction upon it ; 
let us derive the simplest lesson from it. If we 
seek only great and unwonted meanings in these 
gospel narratives and sayings, with an ear and a 
thought only for sublime and hidden mysteries, 
we overlook and lose the truer, better lessons 
that offer themselves only to the child-like heart. 
We are charged to receive the kingdom of God 
as a little child. The greatest facts and most 
vital principles are such as a little child can take 
in ! They are hidden from the too wise and pru- 
dent, — from the ambitious intellect that is too 
far-seeking and deep-searching, and are revealed 
unto babes, — that is, to what is simplest in the 
heart of man. 

" Go quickly, and tell them," said the angel. 
If we might ask him for the reason of the haste, 
and he might answer us, I can suppose he would 
only say, — what any thoughtful heart, with quick 
and kindly sympathies, whether from heaven or 



100 



Go Quickly. 



among men, would say, — Do it quickly, for those 
men, those stricken disciples, are suffering great 
anguish of spirit. They have seen their dear mas- 
ter and friend die a cruel death ; seen his form 
laid in the dark grave ; they are mourners. They 
miss his dear presence unspeakably. They feel 
like sheep without a shepherd, scattered and un- 
cared for ; their hopes are gone ; they are sink- 
ing in despair; their memories, their anticipations 
all sad, even to great anguish of spirit. And 
here is blessed news for them. It will remove 
all their sorrow, transform them, put a new face 
on life and death and all things for them, give 
them back their friend, and their joy in Him, 
and their hope in Him. He is not dead, He is 
risen. True, they will learn all about it at any 
rate, after a while, nevertheless go to them in- 
stantly ) lose not a moment ; do not let them 
suffer an instant longer than you can help, nor 
shed one tear that can be spared. Let consola- 
tion reach them, and change their grief to glad- 
ness as quickly as possible. Do not loiter when 
hearts are bleeding, and there is healing ready for 
them. " Go quickly." 

Was it a word unfitting the grandeur of an 
angel to speak ? Or are there reasons for it un- 
worthy to be put into the lips or attributed to the 
thought of a seraphic being ? Our knowledge of 
angels is very limited and imperfect. We know 
little of their thought and feeling ; but surely we 
can say safely, that if they are higher and holier 
beings than the dwellers of earth, their superi- 



Go Quickly. 



101 



ority must consist partly, at least, in possessing 
in a greater degree and intensity unselfish activ- 
ity ; those sensibilities which are the holiest, the 
divinest, the most beautiful that we are suscepti- 
ble of, or can conceive. I should not know how 
to ascribe any higher attribute to an angelic heart 
than that which shows brightest in Him who was 
made but a little lower than the angels, — namely, 
a quick and tender compassion for all human 
suffering and sorrow, a pity eager to minister to 
the troubled heart, and a quick responsive rejoic- 
ing in sympathy with all pure joy throughout the 
world. The devout imagination of saint and 
poet, in assigning guardian angels to this world's 
pilgrims, to attend their steps, and hover over 
their waking and their sleeping, and watch over 
their welfare, has always loved to attribute to 
them the tenderest pity, the fondest solicitude 
for the objects of their charge, — pensive when 
they err or suffer, and radiant with celestial joy 
when they do well, and are glad. And the piety 
of the world's heart always feels that this is the 
heavenliest garb in which our thought can clothe 
those celestial spirits, and the divinest respect 
that it can assign to them. When we think of 
them we will not think otherwise. 

We read that there is joy in heaven over one 
sinner that repenteth ; and if for that, will there 
not be joy, too, for every sorrow that finds com- 
fort, for every distress alleviated, for every de- 
spairing doubt brightened into cheerfulness, for 
every smile that follows tears ? " Go quickly," 



102 Go Quickly. 



said that shining one. The tender heart brooks no 
unnecessary delay ; it will have its benefactions 
borne upon swift wings. If the angels feel love 
and pity for the children of men, — and how can 
they be angels otherwise, — they must feel this 
holy impatience. 

Let us take home the lesson. It is a very 
small and simple one ; it is not what theologians 
would call a doctrine ; it could not well be put 
into a creed as creeds commonly are written ; the 
lesson is a trivial one to the ear, almost as petty 
and insignificant as that saying of Jesus himself, 
about the cup of water, — a small lesson to come 
to church for, if that be all we are to get to-day. 
And yet it is not very small by the heart's meas- 
urement, whether that heart be a man's or an 
angel's. Nothing can be very small that has to 
do with that first and all-embracing command- 
ment of Jesus, that new commandment of his, — 
not small to meanness, not petty enough for con- 
tempt, not wholly superfluous or insignificant, for 
the furtherance of a Christian life. At any rate, 
it is the lesson of our text, and we must take it. 

" Go quickly." The sentiment of this charge, 
as we have supposed it to lie in the angel's heart, 
unfolds itself for us into large applications. Do 
your good deeds, — all that you have the heart 
to do at all, all that you are Christian enough to 
devise and desire, — do them promptly and at 
once. The kind thing that you design for any 
fellow-creature, do not delay it : that is the spirit 
of the angel's words to the Marys, and to all of 



Go Quickly. 



103 



us. Is there any suffering anywhere that you 
would and can relieve ? — make haste. Hours 
and moments are long to a sufferer; let your 
sympathies make them long to you. Shorten 
them by your swift steps and prompt deeds ; the 
good done quickly is twice done ; a seasonable 
service is doubled in value. Is there a gracious 
word for you to speak to somebody, a word that 
will give comfort, a word of good cheer, a word 
of forgiveness, of reconciliation, of peace, a word 
of good news from afar, or of gladness at home? 
As soon as it is in your thoughts, or in your heart, 
fly to utter it, that there may be no postponement 
of the blessing and the joy. Will your presence 
carry light, strength, courage, to anybody within 
your reach ! It is an angel's visit that you are 
privileged to make ; make it quickly ; wait not 
for milder airs and drier grounds or any more 
convenient season. Are there any to whom you 
owe reparation ? Do not let the sense of wrong 
rankle in their breasts a moment longer than 
you can help ; set that right instantly ; you want 
wings for such an errand as that. Do you stand 
in any relationship which needs to be made hap- 
pier, and can be? To-morrow is not soon enough 
for it. Lives there one whom, by any counsel or 
influence you can save, or turn from any single 
act of folly or sin ? Delay not to send that joy 
up to heaven. Is there any errand of charity or 
mercy appealing to you ? Seize the first moment ; 
take the shortest road ; want and distress cannot 
wait for laggard steps, — at least the heart in you, 



104 



Go Quickly. 



though colder and more selfish than an angel's, 
should not let you feel that they can wait. Be it 
the law of your heart that the brother who can 
be gladdened to-day must not lie weeping or pin- 
ing to-night. Whom can you save from a wakeful 
and tossing anxiety this night ? Let not to-mor- 
row's sun bear witness against you for sluggard 
steps and a careless heart. 

The angel's charge to the Marys seems to ask 
for itself a still wider application. It addresses 
itself not only to the kindly and compassionate 
feelings, but to the whole conscience and reason 
of man. Whatever thou hast to do, which it is 
wise to do, or which it is a duty to do, do it 
quickly ; do it now, — that is the tone of the 
text. Seize the occasion ; let the hand keep 
time to the intent ; couple thought and act close 
together; let the right deed be struck out and 
shaped amid the heat and glow of the soul's first 
prompting. A dilatory habit defeats more good 
purposes, fritters away more moral strength and 
brings more moral discomfort and self-reproach, 
I might almost say, than all other causes put to- 
gether. The movement of human life is so ad- 
justed in relation to the movement of time, nature, 
and Providence, that the harmony of things is 
disarranged, so far as we are concerned, by all 
our stoppages and delays. We have to move 
quickly if we would keep step to the music of 
the universe we are placed in. There is just one 
time for doing whatever we have to do, and if 
that hour strikes unheeded, the thing not done, 



Go Quickly. 



105 



there is a disturbance in the order of things in 
which we move that is not easily corrected, and 
a loss difficult to retrieve. Life is robbed of no 
small measure of its comfort and tranquillity, by 
the slow, hard dragging after us of labors and 
duties deferred, and the farther they drag behind 
the heavier they seem, the greater the friction of 
them, and the greater the disadvantage at which 
we pull upon them. And then arrears accumu- 
late so fast to the dilatory. The slow and sloth- 
ful have to go into moral bankruptcy every little 
while, and take a discharge from their liabilities, 
feeling that the present burden of duties is as 
much as they can bear, and that the long array 
of by-gones, stretching and dragging far behind, 
must be cast off and ignored. This affords tem- 
porary relief; yet not complete relief, for there 
they are, — the old debts of duty forever lying 
along the way that has been traveled over, refus- 
ing to be quite buried in forgetfulness or wiped 
out in insolvency, perpetual witnesses of the 
soul's default, and perhaps one day to be rolled 
together, a crushing mountain- mass, in judgment 
upon its unfaithfulness. The conscience is com- 
paratively an easy and pleasant master when it 
is enjoining the present duty and superintend- 
ing the present labor; but when it links itself 
with the memory, and points us backwards upon 
its commands that we have slighted, and the la- 
bors we have deferred, — then it changes its 
countenance ; then it frowns ; then it plagues 
and whips us ; it will not let us enjoy our ill- 



io6 



Go Quickly. 



gotten respite from its service. We know how it 
is ; the school-boy can tell us how it is, for he 
knows that if he defers his task till he has had 
his sport, the task is harder when it comes, and 
the sport itself was less free-hearted and satisfy- 
ing, and the day has not gone well with him, nor 
closed pleasantly. If he did the duties first, he 
could be cheerful and hopeful about it, and then 
the play would be pleasure indeed. And so it is 
all through the school-day of after life. Work 
deferred to the last moment, and done under the 
whip of imposing necessity, is always reluctant 
and severe ; it has to be, as it were, twice done ; 
and if it be deferred till it is too late to do it at 
all, the remembered neglect of it is tenfold harder 
than twice the doing of it would have been. Oh ! 
the sharp, quick twinges of memory, or the dull, 
slow mortifications we feel, as there comes up to 
mind, every now and then, the act of duty or 
self-improvement, of courtesy or kindness that 
was overlooked or postponed in the time of it, 
and now cannot be done at all, or, if done, pre- 
vents the doing of something else, or loses half 
its value and all its grace and its graciousness ! 
In all the affairs of life, frequent or habitual post- 
ponement is a life-long discomfort, and a continu- 
ous process of demoralization. It lays up an 
exhaustless store of gnawing remembrances ; it 
unknits the moral sinews of the mind ; it ravels 
out every rational web of life ; it leaves a flabby, 
forceless character. 

There is a certain rate of speed — a fixed rate 



Go Quickly. 



107 



— in the things and events around us, and we 
must keep pace with them or we are run over and 
dragged and bruised, and the strength of our life 
is spent in a vain endeavor to catch up with them. 
We chase after them, weary and out of breath, 
always driven, always in a hurry, and yet always 
behindhand ; it is a wretched kind of life ! 

Our life, in the highest view of it, consists of 
a series of opportunities for right doing and well 
doing. They pass on quickly, drop off, link by 
link, as of a chain, never to return ; precious op- 
portunities, our whole spiritual capital, — we must 
seize them as they arise, then or never, — they 
are instantly gone : we have no time to follow 
them, and others have arisen in their places, in- 
viting, commanding our attention and our strength. 
Life is short, considering how much is to be done 
in it, how much there is to put into it, how much 
there is to be won from it ; its work requires dis- 
patch, — the prompt thought, the decisive will, 
the instant deed. The winged hours, the ap- 
proaching end, rebuke our dawdling, and punish 
our sloth. Oh, for our conscience's sake, and for 
our peace, we must keep up with time, — keep 
up with our days, our hours, the very moments ! 
The loitering and postponing habit, taken in all 
its fruits, is utter unfaithfulness and waste of life, 
its obligations, its privileges, its enjoyments. 

If we also, like those saintly women, should 
meet an angel by the grave's side, or in any place, 
in any season, when the soul is most wakeful and 
the heart most tender, there is something that 



io8 Go Quickly. 



he would bid each one of us to do ; it might be 
some great repentance, some new style and course 
of life, — the soul within us can tell us what it 
would be, for it is through the soul that our angel 
speaks to us, — nay, each morning, as we go forth 
to the trial and the work of the day, it is with us 
as though an angel met us at our doors and as- 
signed to us our errands, each man his own, each 
woman, each child. It bids us go render some 
service, or do some act of mercy or kindness ; to 
right some wrong ; to perform some duty ; to 
practice some needed self-denial ; to resist some 
temptation that we are about to meet ; to main- 
tain, by word or act, some principle that is in 
peril with us ; to do the things, whatever they 
may be, that shall make it for us a faithful and a 
well-spent day, — useful to man, pleasing to God, 
nourishing to the heart, satisfying to the con- 
science, and the pledge of better days to come, 
if they shall come, and sufficient unto itself if it 
be the last. And when our angels — visible to 
the inner eye, audible to the spirit's ear, heav- 
enly voices within us — thus speak to us, and give 
us our errands, and point us to the way, they al- 
ways bid us hasten, — do we not hear them ? It 
is no angel if that charge be omitted. The heav- 
enly messengers always counsel speed. It will 
be their office, by and by, in the language of 
the Apocalypse, to stand upon the sea and upon 
the earth, to declare to each one of us, in our 
turn, by Him that liveth for ever and ever, that 
there shall be time no longer. They know the 



Go Quickly. 109 



inestimable worth of time. They know the treach- 
ery of a lingering purpose and a halting will \ and 
therefore, for every errand of love or duty that 
they assign to us, they bid us go quickly. That 
is always their last word to us, as to the Marys, 
in that garden of the sepulchre, — " Go quickly." 

1859. 



IX. 



TRUE RELIGION. 

Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this : To 
visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself 
unspotted from the world. — James i. 27. 

THIS is the only instance in the Bible in 
which the word religion is used so as to 
convey any definition of it. This is a definition, 
and a very sound and satisfactory one. It affirms 
that pure religion is identical with personal good- 
ness. Of course the Apostle did not mean to 
enumerate all the actions or traits which go to 
constitute such goodness, but only to give two 
* or three instances of them. He knew as well as 

anybody that ministering to the helpless and 
afflicted, and keeping free from the vices of the 
world, was not the whole of a good life, not a 
complete enumeration of the things which con- 
stitute it, but samples of them, — these things 
and others like them are the things in which it 
consists. He means to say that a good life, hu- 
mane, useful, just, blameless, pure, is the religious 
life, fulfilling the requirements of the gospel and 
acceptable to God. Religion and practical good- 
ness are one and the same thing. 

This is the Apostle's statement, and it sounds 



True Religion. 



commonplace enough, we may say ; as if every- 
body did not know that, — as if any man of sense 
could doubt it, or give any other definition at 
variance with this. But indeed it is a definition 
that has been very slow in getting itself accepted 
among men. It is not fully nor even generally 
accepted, even yet, in the Christian world, though 
it has at last fairly got a footing, and is gaining 
ground rapidly. It is only in the present age 
that this definition can be said to be received at 
all, or to any extent. Every other kind of defi- 
nition has had historical precedence of this. The 
various Christian sects have set up other tests 
and conditions of the religious character and 
good standing in preference, and almost to the 
neglect of this. The more ritual sects or churches 
have called it religion to observe devoutly and 
strictly certain prescribed rites and forms ; and 
the more doctrinal sects have made religion con- 
sist in modes of belief, in holding certain opinions, 
in interpreting the difficult passages of Script- 
ure aright. All these sects, to be sure, or nearly 
all of them, to do them justice, have faithfully 
urged the importance of moral goodness. They 
have inculcated the practical virtues. Only they 
have maintained that these are not religion, not 
the thing itself, but incidental to it, — resulting 
from it, but not the essence of it. It is some- 
thing else that is the prime condition of salva- 
tion, and makes man acceptable to God ; certain 
observances, or, among the Protestants, more gen- 
erally certain views or beliefs, leading them to 



112 



True Religion. 



consider a religious man as something different 
from a merely good man, and above a merely 
good man, — religion a different thing from per- ' 
sonal goodness, and a greater thing. The defi- 
nition of our text has not had general acceptance 
among Christians. 

Towards the early part of the present century 
there arose here, in New England, a body of men 
who dissented and revolted from the style of 
religious thought that had generally prevailed 
throughout Protestant Christendom. The ele- 
ments which led to this movement had long been 
gathering and working, and then they came to a 
head, and obtained a distinct expression of them- 
selves. These new movers took at first the rather 
vague title of Liberal Christians. Afterwards the 
more narrow and distinctive name of Unitarian 
somehow got applied to them. And though they 
had very slight organization, and no written creed, 
the world insisted on considering them a sect — 
one sect among the many. They were not, and 
are not, really a sect, as other sects are sects, be- 
cause they had no standard of qualifications, no 
test of admission, drew no lines, asked no ques- 
tions of those who proposed to join them, ex- 
cluded nobody for his belief or want of belief, 
recognized no tribunal among themselves that 
could exclude anybody; the door is wide open 
for anybody to come in or go out, and nothing 
said or done about it. But still, other sects could 
not conceive that a body of people should call 
themselves Christians without being a sect, and 



True Religion. 



113 



devoted to a sect, — so they must call these a 
sect, and let it go so. Very likely they deserve 
the title from their having, or some of them, often 
descended to the narrowness and ' partisanship 
that generally characterize sects. 

Now these new people, the Unitarians, had 
their distinctive theology, certainly, though with 
many differences among themselves. They had 
their methods of interpreting Scripture, their 
views of Christian dispensation and the divine 
purposes, leading them to reject many of the doc- 
trines that were generally held. And they were 
not slack in carrying on a controversy with those 
from whom they differed in these matters. But 
their great and obvious mission was to proclaim 
and reestablish the principle involved in our 
present text, namely, that a man's religion does 
not depend upon his mode of belief, but upon 
the state of his heart, and the conduct of his 
life ; and to insist upon it that the truly good 
man was the truly religious man, whatever his 
doctrinal position might be. They controverted 
with zeal certain doctrines, — the doctrine of the 
Trinity, atonement, total depravity, and some 
others, — opposed them in the form in which 
they were generally held. But their great point 
has constantly been, that a man's religion, or his 
salvation, does not depend upon the views he 
holds on these subjects ; that right believing is 
not essential to procuring the divine favor, but 
right being and living. Their chief desire has 
not been so much to break down any existing 
8 



H4 



True Religion. 



theology as to do away the idea that any one par- 
ticular theological belief is necessary to make a 
man religious in the Christian sense of the word. 
Their protest was not so much against particular 
doctrines as against that spirit which said, or 
seemed to say, that certain doctrines constituted 
the narrow gate through which alone there could 
be an entrance to the kingdom of heaven. They 
have insisted that holy living is religion, — good 
deeds and a Christ-like heart. Righteousness has 
been their principal doctrine, the one to which 
they have assigned the place of preeminence ; 
and in their literature and their preaching, it can- 
not be denied, they have very faithfully kept that 
doctrine in its place of precedence. The first to 
take this ground, in modern times at least, they 
have maintained it well and effectively. 

But there are some who are ready to say that 
this attempt to set up character and life in place 
of doctrine or opinion, as the essence of religion, 
has been, or is becoming, a failure ; because they 
say that Unitarianism, with which this attempt 
has been identified, is declining, or, at least, not 
gaining ground, — tending to its decline. This 
is a question of fact. I will not discuss it now, 
except to remark that this religious system has 
been, and is supported by so much of the intelli- 
gence and character and moral influence of the 
people of New England as to render it prema- 
ture, as yet, for its opponents to prepare to dance 
over its grave, or its friends to pronounce its 
eulogy, and put on mourning for its death. 



True Religion. 



"5 



But suppose it has declined, or is about to de- 
cline ; is it because it has failed in its objects, 
and therefore must die, or because it has suc- 
ceeded in them, and therefore it is not neces- 
sary that it should live on ? I am happy to think 
that the latter reason is the real one, upon the 
supposition, which is quite gratuitous, of its 
speedy decay. Even though it should die and 
be buried to-morrow, and the last vestige of its 
denominational existence be swept away forever, 
it will still have been one of the most influential 
and permanently successful religious movements 
of modern times.' It has carried its point to an 
unexampled extent. It has very palpably liberal- 
ized the whole theology of New England. It has 
ceased to be asserted with anything like the old 
positiveness and frequency that men are to be 
saved or lost upon their opinions, or are dear or 
odious to God according to what they believe. 
It is not the custom, as it used to be, to consign 
good men to perdition, on the ground that they 
believe or do not believe this or that tenet of 
theology. Whatever preacher now denounces or 
sorrows over good men as shut out from God's 
favor, on account of their way of interpreting 
Scripture, is behind his age, and preaches to un- 
willing ears and unsympathizing or protesting 
souls, in almost any congregation in New Eng- 
land. Whoever, now, insists that a particular 
mode of belief is necessary to religion, and that 
whole classes of Christians are destitute of relig- 
ion, and cut off from salvation because they dis- 



n6 True Religion. 

sent, that man is rather an exceptional character 
amongst us ; and you will generally find, either 
that he is a new-comer, and, of course, likely to 
be carried away with inordinate zeal, or else that 
he is a stranger, from a less liberal part of the 
country, and has not yet breathed our air long 
enough, or else that he is a born bigot, narrow 
and bitter in the grain, and so incurable. The 
old theory, indeed, that a correct speculative be- 
lief is religion, and the prime condition of the di- 
vine favor, is not expressly rejected or annulled; 
but it is getting practically obsolete ; it is no 
longer in the heart of the people, and can be 
acceptably pressed in hardly any sect or church 
amongst us. Simple goodness in heart and life 
is getting to be appreciated as the essence of re- 
ligion, and that in spite of all creeds and tradi- 
tions to the contrary. 

Now, if these things be so, Unitarianism has 
accomplished the main object for which it took 
up arms, and it is comparatively little matter 
what becomes of it now, as an organism. The 
battle of freedom has been fought, and virtually 
won, and it is comparatively of little consequence 
how soon its champions disarm and disband 
themselves. That point being gained, they have 
little occasion to prolong the contest. They can 
sit down peaceful and respected under their own 
vine and fig-tree, among the religious associa- 
tions to which they have become wonted, or be 
content, if it is best, to go in and sit down with 
their neighbors, on equal terms, under their vine 



True Religion. 



117 



and fig-tree, without being denounced or sor- 
rowed over. Once get it universally admitted, — 
and it is coming to that, — admitted that real re- 
ligion is a thing of heart and life and conduct, 
and not doctrinal belief, and we have got nearly- 
all that we need care for. The revolution de- 
sired is achieved. The liberal system prevails, 
and who cares under what name? If all sects 
become liberal, and annul or ignore the system 
of doctrinal tests, then Unitarianism will have 
lost its peculiar characteristic, and there will be 
nothing important depending upon its progress 
or its decline ; its triumph is the same in either 
case. 

But this diffusion of liberality is not the only 
success that has been gained. Not only have 
the pretensions of the old doctrinal tests been 
abated, but the doctrines themselves, against 
which Unitarianism arrayed itself, have, during 
the controversy, and as the result of it, been 
greatly modified. They assume less rigorous 
forms ; they have had to adapt themselves to the 
intelligence of the times; are less angular, un- 
reasonable, and repulsive ; are so stated and ex- 
plained as not to be very incredible or shock- 
ing to anybody. And since they can no longer 
be urged very successfully as the one only way 
of salvation, they come to be regarded as less 
vitally important, and are not pressed with so 
much constancy and eVnphasis. I suppose there 
is a great deal less doctrinal preaching, and a 
great deal more practical preaching in all sects 



u8 



True Religion. 



than formerly. And I suspect that the preacher 
who most persistently and exclusively preaches 
the distinctive doctrines of his church, will be 
found, other things being equal, to have the 
sleepiest, or the most indifferent, or the most 
discontented congregation. There is constant 
and increasing testimony in all churches that the 
people do not feel most edified by speculative 
and controversial theology, but by whatever tends 
to promote peace and good-will, pious feeling 
and practical goodness ; and so far as that feel- 
ing prevails, Unitarianism ought to be perfectly 
satisfied. 

One of the most important changes produced 
by the controversies of this century, in which 
Unitarianism has taken a conspicuous part, is 
the modification that has been effected in the 
doctrine of future punishment. It is greatly soft- 
ened on all hands. God is not now, anywhere 
amongst us, represented in the character of a 
cruel, vindictive, arbitrary despot, so much as 
formerly. Read the sermons of the great Ed- 
wards upon this subject. You hardly find any- 
thing like them now in the lowest resorts of re- 
ligious fanaticism. The damnation of infants, ■ — 
the idea is so shocking now to everybody that 
it is almost denied that such an idea was ever 
held. Milder conceptions of God, as a Father, 
have got diffused everywhere. And thus the old 
theology is deprived, in a good degree, of that 
potent instrument of terror by which it used to 
wring from unwilling lips and trembling hearts 



True Religion. 



119 



the profession of a doctrinal belief which the 
calm reason would have hesitated to accept, but 
which the flashing fires of hell left little time to 
examine, and made it fatal to doubt about. 

From these several causes, working together, 
the old points of doctrinal controversy have lost 
a great part of their interest in people's minds. 
Who cares much now about the old controversies 
respecting the doctrines of Trinity and atone- 
ment and depravity and election and predesti- 
nation that once took such hold of the popular 
mind ? These have become nearly obsolete is- 
sues ; very little interest is felt in the dispute. 
There is still a diversity of belief upon these 
subjects ; but it is found out that the differences 
are to a great extent verbal, and become often 
quite reconcilable by new and more felicitous 
statements. If it were not for the old names of 
doctrines remaining, as the signals of conflict, 
the doctrines themselves, seemingly so opposite, 
would be found continually moving into one an- 
other and overlapping one another. 

But the chief reason why no zeal of contro- 
versy can be re-awakened on these subjects is, 
that doctrines of this class are no longer gene- 
rally regarded as the vital ones, — that the saving 
faith of the gospel does not consist in opinions 
on these subjects, but in that state of the heart 
out of which practical goodness flows. That the 
true church of Christ consists not of those who 
agree together upon any speculative creed, but 
comprises all good men, of whatever creed or no 



120 



True Religion, 



creed. The day has gone by for setting up doc- 
trines of that class as standards by which to de- 
termine any man's Christian state, or as proofs 
01 disproofs of any soul's salvation. 

It is announced now and then that this or that 
man has arrived at a certain doctrine respecting 
the atonement, or respecting the Trinity, — ac- 
cepting or rejecting it. The matter is interesting 
to the man himself, inasmuch as it shows that he 
has attained to the solution of some difficulty 
that had arisen in his own mind, attained to a 
statement satisfactory to himself of a speculative 
subject on which his mind happens to have been 
exercised and previously unsettled. But the fact 
interests the Christian public very slightly, be- 
cause whatever his doctrine may be upon such 
points, he cannot, in these days, set it up as the 
exclusive means of salvation, nor take ground 
that no one can be truly religious who does not 
concur in his statement. 

Just so far as the principle of our text gets 
established, namely, that pure religion, or the es- 
sence of religion, is goodness, that and nothing 
else, so far all differences of speculative dogma 
become of secondary moment, and may be dis- 
cussed calmly with a single desire to get at the 
truth, without any hurry or jealousy, or bitterness 
or anathemas of any kind. If, as I believe, this 
principle is getting established among all sects, 
and true liberality is too far advanced to be lost 
again, then Unitarians have every reason to be 
satisfied with the results of their movement, and 



True Religion. 



121 



that, just the same, whether their slight denomi- 
national organization shall grow stronger or 
weaker, shall continue or cease. If their princi- 
ples only prevail they will not care whether it be 
under their own banner, — if indeed they ever had 
one, — or under any other or many others. The 
prevalence of the liberal principle, the principle 
of our text, the principle that true religion is not 
dogma, but personal goodness, — the prevalence 
of this principle among the people of all sects and 
creeds, will undoubtedly lead, in time, to some 
modifications of existing sectarian divisions. It 
is already visibly disintegrating several of the 
sects, and will lead to new combinations and a 
different outward regime of the churches. What 
those changes will be, and what new state of 
things will arise, no one can foresee ; and he is a 
bold man who undertakes to plan or predict re- 
specting them. We can only hope and prophesy 
that whenever the church of the future appears, it 
will be a church founded on the principle that 
♦ goodness, not dogma, is religion. 

There will still be, and perhaps always will be, 
theological diversities, different, and often oppo- 
site statements of dogma among Christians. The 
natural diversities of the human mind create, and 
probably will perpetuate, such differences ; and 
we know that a person's theological views become 
very important and dear to him ; his way of ex- 
plaining the great mysteries, solving the mighty 
problems of divine and eternal things ; and they 
become associated inseparably with all his best 



122 



True Religion. 



and most sacred hopes and principles, identified 
with the innermost life of the soul, unspeakably 
precious and important to him. And let them be 
so, and continue so. What matter, what harm, 
if he has only learned to feel and confess that 
different doctrines, and perhaps opposite ones, 
are just as precious and important to his neigh- 
bor, and just as intimately associated in him with 
that goodness in heart and life which is the only 
real religion in either of them. It is no harm 
that there should be various sects, and that, too, 
founded upon theological differences, if it only 
comes to be acknowledged all round that there is 
but one religion, and that that is goodness. Sec- 
tarian divisions, then will not be incompatible 
with charity, brotherly love, and universal good- 
fellowship. One may be of Paul, and another 
of Apollos, and another of Cephas, and yet all 
three be one in Christ, who knew of no religion, 
felt none, and taught none, but simple goodness, 
the love of God and man. 

Looking forward into the future with a good 
hope, and a patient one, of a good time coming 
for the churches and the world, it becomes us to 
be very faithful to this great principle, that relig- 
ion is goodness. Thinking as we do, that we 
and those from whom we inherit, and with whom 
we are most associated, have been rather in ad- 
vance of Christians generally in apprehending 
and announcing and contending for this great 
principle, it becomes us to rejoice gratefully in 
every sign of its prevalence, and to adhere to it 



True Religion. 123 



and promote it with all constancy and earnest- 
ness and charity; to keep fast hold of it, and not 
let it go; never measure our own or any man's 
religion by opinion or doctrine, but simply and 
only by being and doing. 

Personally and practically it is a most strict 
and solemn principle to adopt and live by. God 
will judge us by what we are and do. There is 
no substitute for purity of heart and uprightness 
and usefulness of life. It is never well with any 
but the righteous. We cannot change the issue. 
Nothing will save us but to obey God and keep 
our own hearts and do good to one another. And 
when we stand at last before the judgment-seat, 
the question will not be whose opinions prove 
the correct, but who has been obedient, dutiful, 
keeping the law of love, keeping unspotted from 
the world ; just, humble, penitent for sin, with a 
soul imbued with that one and only religion which 
is pure and undefiled before God and the Father. 

January 8, i860. 



UNITARIANISM. 



Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free, 
and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage. — Galatians v. t. 



AST Sunday morning we took up the posi- 



distinctness, that true religion is practical good- 
ness. We considered how the liberal movement 
of the last half century, which hereabouts has 
been embodied in what is called the Unitarian 
denomination, has taken this ground as its lead- 
ing principle, making its first object to set opin- 
ion free by subordinating dogma to personal 
holiness as the essence of religion. We consid- 
ered the degree of success that had attended the 
movement, that success being manifested in abat- 
ing the pretensions of doctrinal systems to the 
place of spiritual supremacy among Christians, 
and thus liberalizing the churches generally. We 
saw that this movement, even if it should now 
lose its organic existence, would still have proved 
itself one of the most powerful and permanently 
triumphant movements of the age, having intro- 
duced forces, and achieved results of a permanent 
and indestructible character } having achieved an 
immeasurable benefit in reproducing and reestab- 




maintains with such 



Unitarianism. 



125 



lishing in the heart of all sects the ancient apos- 
tolic principle, that the essence of religion is not 
dogma, but goodness. 

I will not recapitulate any farther, but it seems 
to me that some additional views in the same 
general direction may be presented to advan- 
tage, in immediate connection with those already 
given in that discourse. 

My oldest parishioners, those who have lis- 
tened to me through all these thirty years, will 
bear me witness that I have done and said al- 
most nothing to identify them or myself with any 
denomination ; that I have hardly ever spoken 
so much as the word " Unitarian," or expressed, 
or sought to enlist anything like sectarian sym- 
pathies. If my people had no other means of 
information, they would hardly have learned from 
anything I have ever said here, or done any- 
where, that there was any particular body of 
Christians, or class of congregations, that we 
were in any way connected with. Many a 
friendly rebuke has reached me, objecting to this 
stand-aloof policy, as unsocial, as an excess of 
independence, and a throwing away of influence. 
I can hardly say that I regret the course that I 
have pursued, — indeed it has hardly been in my 
nature to pursue any other. I do not remember 
the time when I have not felt an extreme repug- 
nance to being yoked in with anything like a 
sect. I have loved to regard what is called Uni- 
tarianism, not so much as a body of opinions, as 
the principle of liberty of opinion ; not so much 



126 



Unitarianism. 



a distinct organization of men and of churches, 
as an assertion of the independence of churches 
and of individual intellectual freedom, — in a 
word, that perfect liberty wherewith Christ hath 
made us free — no yoke of bondage, no entan- 
gling alliances, — calling none to account, and giv- 
ing account to none. But not caring now to vin- 
dicate myself on this point, I can, at least, claim 
that I have not wearied my people with sectarian 
drill, nor fed them on the husks and bitter roots 
of sectarian strife ; and it is not likely that now, 
so late in life, I shall ever change much in this 
respect, or ever become an efficient promoter of 
a distinctive Unitarian doctrine or organization. 
There is just now, however, something in' the cir- 
cumstances of the time that inclines me to use 
that word, Unitarianism, more freely, with a view 
to considering it as a historical fact, — what it 
has done, and what it has yet to do, and what 
are its claims to the gratitude and respect of the 
Christian world. I am the more moved to this, 
because it seems to be thought by some, out- 
side and inside, that Unitarianism is not just at 
this moment in its state of highest prosperity, but 
is rather undergoing a season of adversity. I 
hear it intimated that there are signs of its de- 
cline ; that the tide of fashion does not set in its 
direction in the metropolitan churches. Some 
say it is dying out at both ends, — at top and at 
bottom ; that from one end many are passing off 
out of reach, into all kinds of ultraism, and at 
the other, as many are slipping away into some 



Unitarianism. 



127 



of the various folds of orthodoxy ; in short, that 
it is a falling house which the prudent and timid 
have left, or are preparing to leave. 

I suppose all this is a mere state of the tide 
for the hour, the accident of a day, a transient 
turn that belongs to the variable fortunes of all 
earthly things. But if it be a season of appar- 
ent adversity with Unitarianism, I, for one, and 
as one of those who have never blown its trumpet, 
nor glorified it, nor championed its cause in the 
days of its prosperity, will, at least, now, when 
many think that the edge of the cloud is over it, 
hasten to pay it a just tribute of honor and grate- 
ful love ; to do justice to the purity of its pur- 
poses, the magnitude of its achievements, and to 
consider what the world has even yet to hope 
from the extension of its principles ; and to as- 
sume my share of whatever odium may be at- 
tached to its name and fortunes. If those who 
have sunned themselves in its light, and have 
worn its honors in its palmier days, betray and 
forsake it in the moment when its visible pros- 
perity is diminished, it is time for outside friends 
of liberty and truth and right to step forward 
and do justice to what is great and noble in its 
principles, and indestructible in its influence. 

Let the form of inquiry in the present dis- 
course be this : What is there in Unitarianism 
that claims for it the honor, and love, and stead- 
fast allegiance, and unwavering confidence of its 
friends ? There are several answers to this ques- 
tion, and we will go over as many as we have 
room for. 



128 



Unitarianism. 



And its first claim to acceptance and respect 
is, that it grounds its authority upon and appeals 
for its support to a careful and honest interpre- 
tation of the Scriptures. It has brought to the 
study of the Bible the best faculties of the ablest 
minds, profound learning, and a spirit of free but 
patient and devout investigation. It has over- 
looked no part of the sacred volume, and yet it 
has used a just discrimination. It has given more 
weight to the teachings of the New Testament 
than to those of the Old, though reverently gath- 
ering all the truth it could from the latter. And 
again, it has assigned more weight to the words 
of Jesus Christ than to those of the Apostles. It 
has thought that where the Master speaks He is 
to be listened to with more deference than any of 
his disciples ; and accordingly, if on any points 
there has seemed to be any difference between 
the teachings of John or Paul and those of Christ, 
it was safest and best to take Christ's words as 
the text, and John's or Paul's as the commentary, 
Christ's as the standard of truth, and theirs to 
be reconciled with his, interpreted by Him, and 
conformed to Him. To know the mind of Christ, 
and to penetrate as deeply as possible into his 
inmost thought and feeling, has been the main 
theological endeavor of Unitarianism. Pursuing 
this method, a somewhat different system of doc- 
trine has been arrived at from that obtained by 
those sects which have reversed this order of pro- 
cedure, and taken Paul or John as the basis, and 
Christ himself only as the subsidiary teacher. A 



Unitarianism. 1 29 

body of scriptural truth has thus been evolved 
which has commended itself with remarkable 
force to the best intelligence of mankind, and 
the system of doctrine thus attained has been 
found, as might be expected from the rational 
and discriminating method of study which has 
been pursued, peculiarly in accordance with rea- 
son and common sense, and peculiarly accepta- 
ble to the most enlightened and rational minds. 
It has been a great joy to multitudes to find a 
system of belief that should be at once scriptural 
and reasonable, a correct statement of the word 
of God as contained in the Scriptures, and yet 
approving itself to the highest faculties of the 
mind, corresponding with the order of nature, 
confirmed by the divine laws and providences, 
harmonizing with the dictates of conscience, 
and the most sacred instincts of the heart, — a 
joy and a triumph that reason and faith, the 
two great lights from God, need no longer be at 
variance nor divorced. Now if we have thus ac- 
cepted and believed these theological views as 
scriptural and rational and true, and they have 
become settled and honest convictions in the 
mind, how can we but cleave to them ? How can 
we honestly escape from them ? How shall we 
dare to shut our eyes against this great double 
light when they have once been opened to see it ? 
Will it do in such a grave matter, in a solemn 
question of truth, to give in to any mere freak 
of fancy, or gust of feeling, or dictate of expe- 
diency ? Will it do, for instance, to give up the 
9 



130 



Unitarianism. 



truth because the majority of men appear to be 
of another way of thinking ? Is there any hon- 
esty in the belief that submits itself to be deter- 
mined and changed by a majority vote ? What 
sort of convictions are those that we can give up 
because they are unpopular ? and what sort of 
convictions are those which we can adopt because 
we rind they are popular and are held by the ma- 
jority ? They cannot be honest, and what we call 
believing is a mere make-believe. 

Or supposing we have given up this Unitarian 
system of truth because we do not like its tenden- 
cies in the minds of some of its adherents, and 
are afraid of its leading into dangerous latitudina- 
rianism, or do not like some of its social aspects, 
or some of its forms of worship, or its neglect of 
forms, or its excess in this, or its lack in that, or 
the idiosyncracies of some of its advocates, and so 
adopt an opposite system of belief in order to get 
away from these things which we fear or which are 
not to our taste. Have we not stultified ourselves 
in so doing? What! the mind's convictions of 
truth to be made dependent upon our fears and 
fancies and tastes ! What sort of belief is that that 
changes upon such grounds ? If we have adopted 
another system under such influences, it is doubt- 
ful whether we ever had any real belief, and it is 
about certain that we have none now. A belief 
assumed from such caprices can have no sense 
of the majesty of truth ; it is no belief; it is mere 
partisanship and a choosing of sides ; it is not 
honest ; we have cheated ourselves ; it is immoral 



Unitarianism. 



and unsafe ; there is self-delusion in it ; it is only 
a make-believe. 

I do not say that we are responsible for our 
convictions, for they are not rightfully under the 
control of the will, or the wish • but we are re- 
sponsible for all willful denials of what we have 
seen to be true, and there is moral guilt in reject- 
ing one belief and accepting another on any other 
grounds than the mind's inmost convictions and 
on good reasons, and on the most deliberate and 
honest decision. All make-believes are demor- 
alizing. Reason has its province, and feeling 
has its province, and there is as much falseness 
and sin in letting feeling, whether in the form of 
fear or love or sympathy, usurp the province of 
reason and lead us to belie our convictions, as 
in letting reason supersede the feelings in their 
province. 

Unitarianism makes its stand first and chiefly 
upon the truth it holds, — the truth as Christ 
taught it, and as the enlightened human reason in- 
terprets and accepts it. Therein lies its strength, 
and that is its hold upon the minds that have 
received it, claiming their firm and honest alle- 
giance through good report and evil report; in 
the face of every danger, in resistance of all al- 
lurements, in spite of any majorities. 

The secondary ground on which this system 
claims our respect and adherence is the power 
there is in it. This would be nothing unless our 
reason were first satisfied of the truth of the sys- 
tem. Truth, before all things, is the law of rational 



132 



Unitarianism. 



beings. But the reason being once convinced of 
its truth, it strengthens one's hold of it, and con- 
fines one's reverent attachment to it, to find that 
it is strong and effective, it is progressive, and is 
becoming prevalent. And these are the charac- 
teristics of the system we are considering. Uni- 
tarianism is very strong, and of most considerable 
power in the Christian world. But how so ? It 
is not strong in the numbers assuming the name. 
It makes a feeble show in the census of Christian 
denominations. It has, and has always had, com- 
paratively few churches and few ministers. It is 
not strong as an organization ; it scarcely has 
any organization ; it has no army with banners ; 
and yet there are signs enough of its unmatched 
potency. How comes it, for one thing, — how 
comes it that this little handful of a denomina- 
tion, a mere handful as to its visible organization, 
should be an object of so much alarm and resist- 
ance to all the great sects of Protestant Christen- 
dom ? Sects that number their millions are afraid 
of nothing so much as of this little straggling 
band. Nothing disturbs them so much as its lit- 
tle insignificant presence. They treat it as if it 
were their principal opponent and danger. They 
warn their people against it with more solicitude 
than against anything else. Their chief contro- 
versies are directed against it; they dread it 
more than popery, more than infidelity, more 
than all other adverse influences. They recog- 
nize it as the one adversary against which they 
are to employ all their learning and logic and in- 



\ 



Unitarianism. 



133 



vective and entreaty and watchful discipline. 
How is it that these great Goliaths of the eccle- 
siastical world tremble before this little, half- 
grown, loose-jointed stripling ? that they are 
always going forth to meet him, as if they had 
none else to fear, and he alone were worthy of 
their steel ? There must be a power in this sys- 
tem, or it could not provoke so much resistance 
and alarm. What is that power, and where is 
the hiding of it ? Not in its numbers, which are 
despicably small in the eyes of those who go by 
count ; not in its organization, for it has none, 
or next to none. It lies in the diffusive power 
of its principles, which altogether overpass and 
outrun its denominational lines, and spread every- 
where, like an atmosphere. Unitarianism, con- 
sidered as a lump, is very small, but considered 
as a leaven, it is vast and omnipresent. As an 
organism it is feeble ; as an influence it is irresist- 
ible. It is not on account of the superiority of 
its men, not from any great things they can do ; 
but because it has been their fortune to take up- 
certain great principles which by their intrinsic 
divinity, and a power of their own, go forth al- 
most unaided, conquering and to conquer, and 
win their silent victories without any visible as- 
sault. 

Such principles as these, — the principle of 
free inquiry, the principle that every man has a 
right to discuss, to reexamine all questions and 
all doctrines, without fear and without hindrance, 
and adopt such conclusions as his reason brings 



134 



Uuitarianism. 



him to, without being denounced as an enemy of 
religion or an outcast from God ; the principle 
that all religious doctrines must be made accord- 
ant with human reason and consciousness and 
experience and pure affection, or else they cannot 
be from God, and cannot be the mind of Christ, 
nor worthy to be accepted ; the principle that 
God is a being of perfect love and justice, and 
therefore can have pronounced against his chil- 
dren no despotic or irrational decree of damna- 
tion, nor have provided any arbitrary or technical 
conditions of salvation ; the principle that the 
laws of God, as discovered in human nature and 
in external nature, must be in harmony with the 
the laws disclosed in any revelation or system of 
religion; and, above all, the principle which we 
discussed last Sunday, that the essence of re- 
ligion is goodness, and that men are not lost or 
saved on their opinions, but on the intrinsic 
character of the heart and life, — these principles, 
which are amongst the leading ones held by 
Unitarians, and which the Unitarians have been 
most conspicuous in stating and defending and 
diffusing, will spread with rapidity and power, 
wherever the human mind becomes enlightened 
and free. No sectarian fence can be built high 
enough to keep them out ; no church doors can 
be so barred by creed or discipline but that they 
will glide in, — the worshipers themselves un- 
knowingly carrying them in, breathing them in 
their breath, and having the infection of them 
in their very garments. The very minister at 



Unitarianism. 



135 



the altar, though he shun the words that embody 
them, cannot keep out the thoughts that include 
them. They insinuate themselves into all creeds 
and among all forms. These principles are na- 
tive to the human soul ; they are its birthright, 
and what wonder if they break through all bar- 
riers of prejudice, and spring up in all inclosures, 
and quietly assert themselves in the face of all 
hindrances. There are more Unitarians — a 
thousand to one — outside of the Unitarian or- 
ganization than inside of it. That is, Unitarians 
essentially, in spirit and in principle, without the 
name, and without the technical doctrines. The 
Unitarians who take the name are very few com- 
pared with those who do not take it ; and those 
embraced in churches called Unitarian are very 
few compared with those scattered in all other 
churches. For every one minister that renounces 
Unitarianism there are five that openly adopt it, 
and scores that become imbued with its spirit and 
preach its great principles with more or less dis- 
tinctness, without taking the name. There are 
many ministers called Orthodox who preach es- 
sential Unitarianism with a more bold and earnest 
aggressiveness than I do, or many others like me, 
who bear the name, and they know how to do it, 
without losing their church connection, though 
not without provoking the bitter hostility of their 
more consistent and conservative brethren. There 
are whole files of most learned, accomplished, and 
influential ministers in the English Episcopal 
Church who, in their own words and in their own 



136 



Unitarianism. 



way, preach and defend as liberal and thorough a 
Unitarianism as I, or probably any of you, hold 
or care to see prevail. They consider it, and 
love to call it, Trinitarianism, and to reconcile it 
with the Thirty-nine Articles ; but what matters 
that ? So much the better, if the doctrines be 
made reasonable, and the liberal principles which 
we hold and love under the name of Unitarianism 
be recognized and established. 

Again, Unitarianism is powerful in its secular 
allies. Literature is almost universally on its 
side. All great writers of this age, excepting 
such of course as write religious books especially 
in the interest of special creeds and churches ; 
all the free, general authors write, without in- 
tending it, but simply as they are led by their 
genius, in the interest of a liberal and rational 
religion. I do not call to mind any eminent liv- 
ing poet in England or America, the influence of 
whose poetry is not on the same side, coincident 
in spirit with the Unitarian theology, whatever 
other church the author himself may belong to. 
All science is Unitarian ; every law of nature 
that is discovered, every fact of nature inter- 
preted, illustrative of the Creator's plan and 
providence, harmonizes with the Unitarian view 
of the divine government. All schools and means 
of education, by whomsoever they are conducted, 
are Unitarian in their influence, and by giving 
freedom and expansion to the mind, prepare the 
way for, and unconsciously lead to, the principles 
that are coincident with this system. The free 



Unitarianism. 



137 



intellect of the age is on its side, however sel- 
dom it may raise its banner; genius is on its 
side ; human nature is on its side. Hence it is 
so powerful. And if, as we believe, the Bible is 
on its side too, what is there that can prevail 
against it ? The name, which is but a poor one 
at best, — hardly better than a nickname, — may 
go out of existence, and few would mourn for 
it ; but its essential principles will go on, rising 
higher and higher towards the ascendant, as long 
as God reigns and man thinks and loves and 
worships. 

There is reason enough, then, why those por- 
tions of the evangelical sects, so called, who are 
unwilling to see any modification of their creeds, 
any relaxation of the rigors of their theology; 
reason enough why they should dread this subtle 
and all-pervading power of liberal and enlight- 
ened thought ; and why they should look with 
alarm and sharp hostility upon Unitarianism as 
visibly representing this thought and this power, 
— not as including a thousandth part of it, but 
representing it and acting as the most avowed 
and acknowledged champion of it. How can 
they but fear and hate it when they see it diffus- 
ing its healthful, liberating influence, as we call 
it, or its deadly virus, as they call it, into the 
thick of their own stanchest ranks, running along 
the aisles of their most exclusive churches, and 
climbing into their best-guarded pulpits, under- 
mining their systems and shaking their power. 
They are right and sagacious in regarding this 



138 



Unitarianism. 



little denomination, which they despise for the 
weakness of its organization and its insignifi- 
cance as to numbers, in regarding it, and mani- 
festly recognizing it, as the one antagonist requir- 
ing their sharpest watchfulness and their best 
energies to assail and resist. 

And the same reasons which lead its enemies 
to hate and fear it so much, ought to lead us to 
love and honor it with an equal ardor. It is a 
supreme privilege and joy, and such we should 
account it, to have been led, whether by God's 
favor and providence or by the diligent exercise 
of our own faculties, into a faith that puts us in 
unison with the facts of the universe and the 
laws of the soul, — -a faith that finds itself in 
league with what is freest, strongest, noblest in 
the human mind, and finds the God of revelation 
identical with the God of nature, — a faith that 
is thus strong in the Lord, and in the power of 
his might : that reconciles piety with reason, and 
couples the confidingness of a child-like heart 
with the strength and attainments of the manly 
mind. It is a glory and a delight to find one's self 
sailing over the seas of existence along with and 
not against the Divine currents, breathing the 
free airs of all God-given truth, and all man's 
most generous thought ; to have torn away from 
the soul the dark and thick pall of theologic mys- 
tery and terror, and to be able to lift our heads 
and stand erect under God's open sky, and 
breathe and aspire freely. This soul-liberty is a 
boon to cherish as above all price. If, through 



Unitafianism. 



139 



God's grace, we have attained to it, how can we 
ever relinquish it again ? If we have gone forth 
into it, and found our feet set in its large places, 
and have enjoyed its untrammeled franchise, and 
walked with Christ and talked with God in the 
cool of its vast garden, and under the leadings 
of its cheery inspiration, how can we ever will- 
ingly go back within gloomy walls and barred 
doors and confined airs, and submit the mind to 
be shackled, and the heart to be oppressed with 
terror and gloom ? How can we give up our 
birthright when we have once enjoyed it ? Let 
the Apostle repeat his exhortation to us : "Stand 
fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath 
made us free, and be not entangled again with 
the yoke of bondage." 



January 15, i860. 



XL 

INFIDELITY. 

For what if some did not believe ? Shall their unbelief make the faith 
of God without effect ? — Romans iii. 3. 

MY hearers must bear with me if I ask them 
this once more to follow on in the track 
of the last two morning discourses. In those dis- 
courses the starting-point was that real religion 
consists in simple goodness of heart and life, and 
not in opinions held. We saw how the principle, 
as far as it prevails, sets opinion free, — that is, 
leaves every mind to form its own opinions, 
calmly, dispassionately, disinterestedly, uninflu- 
enced by any threats of being damned unless 
those opinions are of a certain kind, there being 
no such thing as any fatal error of opinion if the 
opinion be honestly arrived at and held. It was 
observed — and might have been remarked with 
more force — that this free, unbiased, unterrified 
state of mind is much more likely to lead to 
truth of opinion, or doctrine, than that state of 
mind in which it is considered dangerous to be- 
lieve but in one way. We considered how the 
movement called Unitarianism, embodying this 
first great principle, and thus proclaiming free- 
dom for the human mind, has taken a position of 



Infidelity. 



141 



great power. Liberty is ever so dear and wel- 
come that every assertion of it is received far 
and wide with a lively and energetic sympathy. 
We saw how this principle of religion being good- 
ness and not dogma, together with the principle 
of liberty accompanying it, had led to what we 
consider better methods of interpreting Script- 
ure, and had resulted in more rational theological 
opinions, juster and happier views of the divine 
purposes and of human destiny. We saw how a 
system with such characteristics — scriptural, ra- 
tional, free, liberal, and powerful — is entitled to 
the reverent love and firm allegiance of those 
who have been privileged to receive it. 

So far we have considered this system, called 
Unitarianism, in its relation to those less free and 
less rational systems from which it was a depart- 
ure and a protest, — that is, in reference to so- 
called Orthodoxy. It remains now to contemplate 
it in its relations to infidelity. Whether it pro- 
duces or tends to a rejection or decay of all relig- 
ious truth, thought, and interest. This is a very 
grave question, and a candid examination of it 
now may be both timely and profitable. Is this 
system of free inquiry and liberal thought and 
rational religion drifting its adherents towards the 
great gulf of infidelity, and under the name of 
religion preparing the way for the extinction of 
religion ? 

One of the readiest and most effective methods 
of assailing and discrediting any new religious 
movement has always been to pronounce it in- 



142 



Infidelity, 



fidel in itself or in its tendency. When Jesus 
Christ introduced his new ideas to the effect that 
love and obedience and purity and rectitude con- 
stituted true religion, — these and not ceremonial 
observances, — the priests and Pharisees, those 
who had charge of the religion of the time, re- 
garded his influence as subversive of religion it- 
self ; pronounced Him a blasphemer, and had 
Him crucified as an infidel. When his first disci- 
ples went forth into the Roman world and spread 
their Master's name and doctrine, refusing to cast 
incense on the altars of the gods of Rome, they 
were proscribed and put to death as atheists and 
infidels ; and that is the term that still stands ap- 
plied to them in the official reports and historical 
literature of that period. When the reformers of 
the sixteenth century broke with the pope and the 
church, the orthodox of that time pronounced 
them infidels, the deniers and enemies of relig- 
ion. When the New England Unitarians declared 
their dissent from the creeds of the prevailing 
churches here, the leaders of Orthodoxy declared, 
and multitudes in their hearts believed, that it 
was virtual infidelity, a raising of the standard of 
revolt against the Christian faith, and none the 
less for being done in Christ's name. But as the 
time had soon arrived when Jesus was no longer 
regarded as an infidel, and again when the first 
disciples were no longer so stigmatized, and the 
seceders from Rome had outlived that accusa- 
tion ; so in our time, the Unitarians became, in 
the progress of years, so numerous and influen- 



Infidelity. 143 



tial, so much respected for intelligence and char- 
acter, and many of their men and women became 
so well known for saintly virtue and piety, that 
the charge of infidelity against them grew faint 
by degrees, and has well-nigh ceased in all intel- 
ligent quarters ; can hardly be spoken in open 
day; is seen on all hands to be too preposterous. 
The charge is virtually withdrawn, partly for the 
reason I have named, and partly because the 
presence of a liberal sect necessarily liberalizes in 
some degree all the sects that surround it ; and 
there is hardly any disposition now, except by a 
few small bigots or lordly anathematizers, and 
that in dark corners, to reiterate that old, obso- 
lete reproach. Very few, now, of those worth list- 
ening to, have either the courage or disposition to 
say that Unitarianism is infidelity. That is, not 
regular, staid, old-fashioned, conservative Unita- 
rianism. That — what there is of it — may pass, 
by a charitable construction, as a form of faith, 
though an imperfect one, held by sincerely re- 
ligious persons, and not an outright infidel sys- 
tem, not infidel in spirit and intent. But see, 
they say, some of the fruits of Unitarianism ! 
See into what religious radicalism some of its 
adherents pass ! What lawless speculations they 
indulge in ; how irreverently they criticise and 
dissect the Bible ; what liberties they take with 
the historical evidences of Christianity; and how 
they fall off from Unitarianism itself as being 
too narrow, too conservative ;.and what a multi- 
farious brood of free-thinkers, come-outers, athe- 



144 Infidelity. 



ists, radicals of all sorts, has been nourished in 
the bosom of Unitarianism, and has then passed 
off into all manner of dissent and denial, into the 
great inane of wild, unchristian speculation. That 
is the' infidelity that is now most observed and 
feared, a vast, heterogeneous collection of non- 
descript opinions and denials. And that, they 
say, is the legitimate fruit of Unitarianism, — 
Unitarianism gone to seed. The enemies of the 
system point to that with solemn warning as the 
result of a liberal faith, saying, Beware how you 
enter upon a course of thought and inquiry that 
may end thus. Keep to the old paths, lest if you 
venture upon new ones you come upon the edge 
of such a precipice. 

And some Unitarians themselves become 
alarmed in the contemplation of these alleged 
results of the liberal system, and have their mis- 
givings about the safety and wisdom of a system 
which, however sound in itself, leads to such con- 
sequences, and are almost afraid to trust them- 
selves on ground which, however solid itself, has 
such a fearful margin, such dangerous, outlying 
swamps of infidelity, in which to founder and 
perish. 

When a year or two ago a respected minister 
left the Unitarian ranks and formally entered an- 
other fold, his declaration of reasons, as well as 
I can remember it, dwelt principally, if not exclu- 
sively, upon this great danger, this fatal tendency. 
So many who had. been Unitarians, or had got 
imbued with the principles of Unitarianism, who 



Infidelity. 



145 



had gone forth from its bosom, and perhaps were 
still clinging to the outer edge of its skirts, who in 
his view had become, or must become, infidels. I 
will not consider what must be the peculiar con- 
stitution of a mind that can reject opinions which 
it had received as true, because some people wan- 
dered from those opinions into error; or that 
could accept certain other opinions, not as true, 
but because they seemed safe against that partic- 
ular danger, but only remark that such a mind 
probably represents the falterings and misgivings 
of some who still remain attached to the liberal 
system. And no doubt there are many persons 
outside the Unitarian churches who have great 
sympathy with Unitarian doctrines as scriptural 
and reasonable, honorable to God and cheerful 
for men, who yet are kept back from a full ac- 
ceptance of them by their fears. They are afraid 
of Unitarianism on account of the mental liberty 
that goes with it ; are afraid of the principle that 
gives men full freedom to think their own thoughts 
and adopt whatever opinions they find true, with- 
out having their soul's salvation staked upon the 
absolute correctness of those opinions ; afraid of 
it because it takes off all restraint and may lead, 
and does lead, sometimes, into they know not 
what extravagances and absurdities of belief or 
of denial. Once begin to inquire freely and ra- 
tionally, and where is there a stopping place to 
it ? they ask. What is to hinder one's going on 
beyond the limits of any believing at all ? If we 
take the liberty to range over the whole field of 
10 



146 



Infidelity. 



Christian thought unrestrained, what is there to 
hinder us from overpassing its boundaries and 
stepping out of it altogether ? And they point to 
the many who do step out of it. The fear of in- 
fidelity is thus a great obstacle to the progress of 
visible and organic Unitarianism. 

Now I do not profess much concern about the 
prosperity of visible and organic Unitarianism ; 
yet this obstacle to it ought to be examined and 
weighed, — the danger of its leading into infi- 
delity. It is a false alarm and a groundless ob- 
jection. 

In the first place, it is hardly reasonable to 
hold any system responsible for the undesigned 
abuses that grow out of it, or to judge it in any 
way by facts that have merely an historical con- 
nection with it. Upon this principle of judging, 
the pharisaic Judaism of Christ's time would be 
responsible for, or entitled to, the credit of Christ's 
own system of thought and teaching, for He was 
nurtured in its bosom, and was, historically, one 
of its consequences. Upon this principle, the 
Church of Rome must be held responsible for 
the movement of the reformers if it was a bad 
and infidel movement, and have credit for it if it 
was Christian and beneficial ; for it sprang di- 
rectly and legitimately out of the heart of that 
church, and none the less its child for being in 
the form of a protest, — a child of its loins, and 
none the less for being a rebellious one. Upon 
this principle the old puritan Orthodoxy must be 
held responsible for Unitarianism, must be blamed 



Infidelity. 147 



for it or credited with it ; for, such as it is, good 
or bad, it germinated and grew up in the very- 
heart of that Orthodoxy, its necessary product, 
and its lineal successor and heir. Do you say 
that Unitarianism produces and is responsible for 
all the modes of belief, or no belief, which have 
followed or accompanied it historically ? I beg 
you to be consistent, and say also that Orthodoxy 
is responsible for the Unitarianism that has his- 
torically accompanied or followed if, and remem- 
ber that, if Unitarianism is the mother of all these 
deformed children which you so loathe and dread, 
Orthodoxy is the grandmother of them. We are 
all too closely related to one another in our va- 
rious systems to make it very safe or consistent 
to say much about responsibility. If the acorn 
produces the oak, remember that there was a pre- 
vious oak which produced the acorn. Intellect- 
ually and spiritually we are all near relations, too 
strictly of one family to admit of any taunts on 
the question of lineage. 

If, however, it shall be insisted that Unitarian- 
ism must be judged partly by its consequences, 
and that one of those consequences is an unprec- 
edented growth and extension of infidelity, the 
Unitarian need not shrink from that issue, but 
very cordially accept it. 

And I maintain, in the second place, with en- 
tire confidence, that on the charge of promoting 
infidelity, Unitarianism stands better on the rec- 
ord than any other system of belief whatever. Its 
influence has not been to produce infidelity, but 



148 



Infidelity. 



to prevent it and cure it, and there is less infidel- 
ity where this system has a footing than anywhere 
else in Christendom. 

We must admit at the outset, that every preva- 
lent system of belief is accompanied and followed 
by something that is called infidelity ; that is, a 
dissent, denial, a going farther, going outside of 
the fold. The shape and style of that dissent or 
denial or infidelity will depend upon the charac- 
ter of that fdld from which it is a breaking away. 
Orthodoxy, or, as it likes to call itself, the evan- 
gelical faith, where it possesses the exclusive ec- 
clesiastical sway, is, and always was, accompanied 
by its infidelity of a different stamp : let that be 
admitted. And it is worth while to examine the 
different characteristics of the two kinds, and see 
which is to be preferred of the two evils. 

And one difference to be noted is this ; the 
infidelity which Orthodoxy generates is apt to 
be accompanied by hypocrisy, and naturally so. 
Where Orthodoxy holds absolute sway, opinion 
is not free. I say that advisedly, though some 
may think it a calumny. I mean that doctrines 
are not left to be accepted or rejected solely upon 
their merits, as being true or false. There may 
be no legal restraint nor civil penalties, no tor- 
tures of the inquisition or the stake ; but it is a 
principle with consistent Orthodoxy that certain 
opinions must be held as a condition of salva- 
tion; that whoso rejects those opinions loses 
God's favor, loses his soul. He is wept over as 
an outcast ; he is pointed to as a warning ; he is 



Infidelity. 



149 



a spiritual pariah \ he is denounced as danger- 
ous ; he is told, and his friends and neighbors 
are told, that hell gapes for him ; he is approached 
with a mortifying compassion, or shunned with 
abhorrence. If, therefore, as will so frequently 
happen, his mind revolts from those opinions, 
and casts them off, he is under the strongest pos- 
sible temptation to conceal his dissent • and in- 
deed it requires extraordinary force and courage 
to declare it, and to take upon himself the doom 
of a spiritual leper in his community, and per- 
haps in his household. So he must suppress the 
. utterance of his thought, do violence to the irre- 
sistible conclusions of his God-given reason, deny 
the light that he sees, and keep on wearing a garb 
that pinches and suffocates him, taking into his 
soul the infinite demoralization of a hypocritical 
conformity. Accordingly, wherever Orthodoxy 
has undisputed sway, and no liberal system has 
sprung up or is tolerated, there, as it is well 
known and confessed on all hands, is an immense 
amount of concealed infidelity, and the heart of 
the church is tainted and cankered through and 
through with the master vice of hypocrisy, that 
deadliest corruption, alongside of which no real 
goodness can spring, no virtue blossom in the 
heart. Under such circumstances there will be 
great numbers assenting to creeds which they 
abhor, taking part in observances which they de- 
spise as a mummery • using the language and wear- 
ing the looks of a high-wrought piety, after it has 
become to their souls all cant and hollowness ; 



Infidelity. 



enacting a daily lie under the very forms of wor- 
ship • calling that truth which is no truth to 
them ; submitting to ascetic practices which the 
prevailing fashion of saintship requires, but which 
all their reason and all their heart protest against 
as folly and oppression. An hypocrisy that trans- 
forms men who, if they were free, would be sincere 
and rational and noble, into whited sepulchres, 
all fair without, but spiritual death and utter rot- 
tenness within ; the mournfullest spectacle of a 
debased and perishing soul that the heart-search- 
ing eye of God has to look upon in all his uni- 
verse. This is the infidelity, aggravated with 
hypocrisy, that afflicts every orthodox church 
where there is no liberal one alongside of it. 
And none see it more clearly or mourn for it 
more sincerely than all the good and sincere men 
in those very churches. They feel it to be their 
one great humiliation and grief. They are not 
aware that it is the fault of their system ; but it 
is. It could not be otherwise.where a particular 
set of opinions is held up as necessary to salva- 
tion in eternity, and spiritual good repute in 
time. Infidelity made ten times more the child 
of hell by hell's first principle of falseness — hy- 
pocrisy. 

The liberal system, on the other hand, — and 
this is what makes it the liberal system, — judges 
no man by his opinions, and holds that God will 
not judge him by his opinions, nor punish him 
for erroneous ones, if he only arrive at and hold 
them honestly, — that religion is not dogma but 



I 



Infidelity. 1 5 1 

goodness. Therefore Unitarians, as far as they 
are consistent with their system, leave a man un- 
trammeled as to what he shall think, and free to 
say what he thinks, be it what it may. If he be 
sincere they do not doom him for his errors, or 
mourn over his lost soul. They have no frown, 
no ban, no penalty of lost standing, for the hon- 
est thinker, whatever the result of his thinking, 
and have all respect for the truthful mind, how- 
ever little of truth, or much of error, it may have 
reached. Accordingly those who become infidel 
within the liberal ranks are free to become so, 
free to declare their doubts and denials ; have no 
inducements to conceal them, suffer no odium for 
them. They can discuss their difficulties frankly 
and without scruple, with their ministers or their 
friends, and so have some chance to get relieved 
of them. And there can be no doubt that a great 
many are saved from unbelief by this freedom in 
confessing and stating their doubts. Skepticism 
is not half so likely to run into utter denial if 
permitted to speak out, without shame or fear. 
Nothing is more fatal to faith than a concealment 
or suppression of doubt. 

The main point of difference is, that under the 
liberal system infidels have no inducements to be 
hypocrites. They can retain their integrity ; they 
can be true men still, if not Christians. If relig- 
ious observances are a hollow mockery to them, 
they can abstain from them, and not be adjudged 
spiritual reprobates. If they do not believe the 
approved doctrines, they need not use the lan- 



1 5 2 Infidelity. 



guage of them for a pretense. They are saved 
from the soul-killing necessity of cant and hypoc- 
risy. They are not made false, through and 
through, merely because they do not agree in 
opinion with the majority, or with anybody. Our 
infidels, such as we may have among us, may 
be, and I believe generally are, true and sincere 
men, and that I regard as an immense moral 
advantage on the liberal side in respect to infi- 
delity. 

And it has another still greater moral advan- 
tage in this respect ; that the infidelity which pro- 
ceeds from the liberal system possesses a higher 
moral and spiritual character than that which 
springs from the Orthodox system. 

In those regions and periods in which the Or- 
thodox system has had exclusive possession, infi- 
delity has had a very peculiar and marked char- 
acter. Where it has not hid itself under the 
poisonous veil of hypocrisy and false-hearted con- 
formity, it has generally resulted in outright scoff- 
ing, a low and corrupt materialism, a profane 
defiance of all religious ideas, and, but too fre- 
quently, an utter abandonment of all moral prin- 
ciple, — reckless antagonism to all that is true 
and holy in thought and life, — so as to make the 
very term infidelity synonymous with all mental 
and material profligacy and abasement. Whereas, 
the great mass of those who have passed into in- 
fidelity from or through the liberal system have 
been, and are, earnest and honest men, thought- 
ful and sincere, religious even, in their way, hold- 



Infidelity. 



153 



ing something in supreme reverence, if not the 
same things that we do. Their infidelity affords 
no presumption against the purity and upright- 
ness of their lives. Indeed they would generally 
be said to be fanatical on some moral idea and 
in some moral direction, running it out into some 
form of ultraism, — most of them renouncing the 
Christianity of the church on the ground that it 
is not Christian enough for them, and cutting 
loose from it that they may be free, as they say, 
to carry out to its utmost lengths some principle 
of justice or love. They are very apt to be phi- 
lanthropists of one type or another, disturbing us 
by their zeal and unwisdom, but not leaving us to 
question their sincerity or the rectitude of their 
motives. They heap merciless scoff and scorn 
upon our religious ideas and forms and institu- 
tions, but not often upon the great ideas that un- 
derlie them all, — God and immortality and love 
and right. In personal morals they are often as- 
cetic ; in domestic and neighborly relationships, 
affectionate and exemplary • in their plan of 
life, self-sacrificing. Such is the difference be- 
tween the two classes of infidels, for which the 
two systems are severally responsible, — if in- 
deed responsibility is to be predicated in such 
matters. And it is the difference we should ex- 
pect to find, judging from the character of the 
two systems. The orthodox system, whether Cath- 
olic or Calvinistic, is, and makes it its glory that 
it is, at variance with human nature, — a scheme 
of salvation not deducible from, and not in ac- 



154 



Infidelity. 



cordance with, human reason, — something quite 
apart from and above even the best instincts of 
the heart, and the best moral principles of the 
conscience. It is not developed from the soul, 
but superinduced upon it, — a plan arbitrarily pre- 
scribed by Deity for the soul's salvation ; its ef- 
fectiveness conditioned upon our understanding 
that plan, and believing in the rather complicated 
details of it. To believe in that plan is religion, 
the whole of it, the essence of it, — virtuous prin- 
ciples and good affections being the mere inci- 
dents of religion, not the substance of it. Now, 
such being the idea of religion under the ortho- 
dox system, those who reject that idea and that 
plan have nothing left that they are permitted to 
call religion. It has always been impressed upon 
them that mere morality, or goodness, is utterly 
valueless except in connection with certain modes 
of belief, and in losing those modes of belief they 
of course lose everything; they must fall into utter 
infidelity, and there is nothing to break their fall. 
Not to believe is to fall so low that they cannot 
fall any farther. Their moral nature has never 
been cultivated, or held to be of any account, ex- 
cept in connection with that system of belief ; 
when that is gone, all is gone. How can it be, 
then, but that the infidelity which is produced 
under such circumstances should leave the soul 
utterly barren of religious influences, the artificial 
stripped away and the natural never developed. 
There will be, indeed, spiritual desolation which 
must run out into scoffing and spiritual dark- 



Infidelity. 155 



ness, and unredeemed licentiousness of thinking 
and living. And that is, and always was, and 
must needs be, the type of the infidelity that 
springs up under the orthodox system. 

The liberal system, on the other hand, building 
itself upon reason and upon the natural senti- 
ments of the heart, cultivates with great care, of 
course, the natural, moral sentiments and affec- 
tions — teaches that goodness is religion. There- 
fore, when any of those who have been bred under 
its influence come to reject its theological doc- 
trines, they cannot be told that on that account 
they have lost all their religion • and have never 
been led to think — and are not permitted to think 
even if they would — that they have risen above, 
or fallen below, the great principles of rectitude, 
love, and purity, which constitute the essence of 
religion and secure the favor of God. Wherever 
they may wander speculatively, they have to carry 
with them the elements of religion, — their own 
moral nature. They have been trained under a 
system that holds them to their spiritual alle- 
giance to God by every fibre of their hearts, by 
every principle of rectitude that they apprehend, 
by every tie of brotherhood that binds them to 
their kind. They have been taught that theology, 
or opinion, is secondary, and goodness alone pri- 
mary ; that the divine law is irrepealable, the di- 
vine favor conditioned on nothing but obedience ; 
that true religion is not an organization or a creed, 
or a ritual which may change, but a principle of 
holiness that changes not ; that cannot be fled 



1 5 6 



Infidelity. 



from, and will not be taken away. They have 
been taught that true religion is in perfect. ac- 
cordance with honest reason and right feeling, 
and that, however opinions may change, religion 
itself does not take off its restraints, nor withhold 
its delights, its comforts, or its rewards. 

Accordingly, whenever under this system per- 
sons become speculatively or theologically infidel, 
it does not follow that they must fall into infidel- 
ity of the heart or life ; and it is found that they 
generally do not ; but are good and sincere men, 
leading possibly a more Christian life than many 
that remain within the Christian fold. I do not 
say that it is always so, but such is the character- 
istic of what is called infidelity under the liberal 
system, and we have ample reason why we should 
expect it to turn out so. 

If, therefore, it is right to judge any system by 
the infidelity that grows up under it, and if there 
must be more or less infidelity under every sys- 
tem, I thank God that that which is chargeable 
upon the liberal system is what it is, and not 
what the opposite system has to deal with ; that 
it is thoughtful, moral, philanthropic, however 
wild in its speculations, revolutionary in its spirit, 
and fanatical in its movements ; that it is that, 
and not scoffing denial of every divine thought 
and holy principle, and an abandonment to a 
godless theory and a lawless life, and a con- 
tempt and hatred for every religious bond. If 
we must be answerable for either kind of infi- 
delity, let it be that which the liberal system is 
chargeable with and not the other. 



Infidelity. 157 



So far from its being true that Unitarianism 
has brought in a flood of infidelity, I solemnly be- 
lieve it is and has proved the most effectual bar- 
rier against infidelity that has been raised in this 
age. It has saved its millions from falling into 
that gulf. Ours is an age in which reason must 
and would have waked up and asserted its rights ; 
and hosts upon hosts, rejecting the orthodox sys- 
tem, would have gone over into utter denial of 
all divine truth and law, had there not been this 
liberal system interposed to arrest their steps and 
give them a refuge in which they could be at 
once rational and religious. And if any have 
still gone on through this system into outside infi- 
delity, they have carried with them an influence 
that has leavened and greatly redeemed even 
that, and made infidelity itself another thing from 
what it was. 

Indeed, what we have been saying is enough 
to remind us that we must be careful how we 
brand this or that mental position with the name 
of infidelity in its bad sense. I confess myself 
not so clear as to what real infidelity is. I see 
so many good and pure men, and spiritually- 
minded men, too, who have that name applied to 
them, and are themselves ready to bear it, that it 
has almost ceased to be a term of reproach, and 
one might esteem it an honor to bear it if he 
could have the heart and character that go with 
it. We are not called upon to judge it, but to 
take care that it do not judge us before the bar 
of God, and find us wanting. 



iS8 



Infidelity. 



We may rightly deplore in anybody the loss of 
that belief which we hold precious j but remember 
the vital faith of the heart may remain dear to 
God, notwithstanding. 

We regret the wild and turbulent vagaries of 
free speculation, and yet we may glory in the lib- 
erty that permits them, and in the vigorous soil 
that produces them. They are the price we must 
pay for liberty of thought, and the boon is worth 
a million times what it costs. And let us not fear 
these things. What is false and unfounded in 
them must disappear and come to nought if left 
free, and what is true and noble in them will live, 
thank God ! and secure its place in the heart of 
the world. So liberty, free thought, is our fran- 
chise from God, and the final results of it must 
be good, and only good, tending to the glory of 
God, and to nothing else. That door of liberty 
has been opened, through the instrumentality of 
the liberal system, and what man with a freedom- 
loving, Anglo-Saxon heart within him, does not 
rejoice to see that it is open, and to believe that 
it never can be shut again ? The main result of 
that opening, in the long run, and even already, 
is not infidelity, but faith ; and the Unitarian 
movement can be regarded by its friends in no 
more gratifying and satisfactory aspect than in its 
relations to infidelity. 



January 22, i860. 



XII. 

ONE FAITH. 

One faith. — Ephesians iv. 5. 

IN the three connected discourses just preached 
here, relating to the character, position, and 
claims of what is called liberal Christianity, it 
may have been observed that nothing has been 
said about faith. I doubt if the word has been 
used more than once, and yet it is a word of im- 
mense significance, a word of constant use in the 
Scriptures, and filling a large space in all Chris- 
tian literature ; and it has been universally con- 
ceded that the thing called faith is, by its presence 
or absence, its strength or its weakness, the meas- 
ure or the test of Christian character, — a religious 
state of the soul. I have spoken largely of opin- 
ions, doctrines, systems, but not a word of faith. 
The omission has not been accidental, nor the 
result of inadvertence, or of a wish to put the 
word out of sight or out of use • but it has been 
omitted, or rather reserved, for a separate con- 
sideration, because it seemed important not to 
confound faith with mere opinions or speculative 
tenets, but to discriminate between a man's faith 



i6o 



One Faith. 



and his theological system, and show that they 
are not one and the same thing. 

But it is time now to consider what faith is and 
what it is not, — its rightful place in the order of 
religious thought and experience. And it is a 
word that cannot be disposed of by any single 
brief definition, for it is a state of mind that has 
infinitely varied phases and directions and com- 
binations and results ; and any description of it 
must be extended and complicated enough to em- 
brace the description of all the high affections 
and virtuous principles and devout moods of the 
soul. The word is used in the New Testament 
in so many different connections, and with so 
many different shades of meaning, that it would 
be a tedious and not very satisfactory process to 
make selections of texts and classify them so as 
to exhaust the subject by an analysis of Scripture 
quotations. We should be wearied out with de- 
tails before we reached any result. I must try 
rather to indicate the result, and leave the de- 
tails of textual interpretation and comparison to 
your personal leisure and inquiry. 

We have shown that the most distinguishing 
feature of Christianity, as liberal Christians un- 
derstand it, is this : that true religion does not 
consist in dogma or observance, but in personal 
goodness ; and according to this view faith can 
be nothing less than that state of the soul which 
generates personal goodness, that inner fountain 
of spiritual life which is called the gift or inspi- 
ration of God's Spirit, and out of which proceed 



One FaitJi. 



161 



holy desires, just purposes, loving affections, 
piety, meekness, patience, truthfulness, all noble 
actions, all beautiful living. Faith is the fount- 
ain, these are the streams. Faith is the inner 
germ ; these are the visible blossomings and fruit- 
age. Faith is the soul, and these the body, of 
holy living. Faith the basis ; these the super- 
structure. Faith the inspiration • these the out- 
ward expression it takes, and the visible forms in 
which it clothes itself and goes forth. Faith is 
the root ; and these are the branches. 

But this description is too vague and general. 
We want to know what faith is to a man's con- 
sciousness and experience. We want to know, 
not only what its results are, but what it is itself, 
how it feels, and moves within, and how it gives 
witness of its presence and agency. Let me say, 
then, as a nearer approximation to a specific defi- 
nition, that faith is a believing temper or ten- 
dency of the mind, taking a spiritual and moral 
direction. It is that state or tendency by which 
the soul is disposed or impelled to regard spirit- 
ual existences and moral distinctions as realities, 
and as the surest and the greatest realities ; to 
discern a Creator in his works, a Lawgiver in the 
working of his laws, a Father in the tokens of 
his care and love. It is something that makes 
the soul feel child-like and trustful, and makes it 
look up and behold, with devout joy, a Being to 
trust in and to lean upon. It is that spiritual 
eye by which some persons see that moral good- 
ness and purity are the supreme beauty ; that jus- 
1 1 



One Faith. 



tice is the eternal law of things and souls ; that 
love is the one measureless wealth and joy ; that 
sin is the one deformity and woe of the world, 
and repentance and renewal the one glorious 
remedy, and compassion and mercy the sweetest 
and the surest attributes of the divine nature. It 
is the believing, the confiding, the uplooking 
spirit, seeing more than the senses can see, ob- 
jects and interests above these gross, material 
ones ; conceiving and aspiring to a life above the 
animal life ; catching eagerly at every inspiring 
word and example that brightens and confirms 
its own visions and strengthens its confidence. 
It is the spiritual or the religious element in man, 
— that which disposes him and enables him to 
worship and obey, and trust a something higher 
than himself, and to do nobler deeds, and live a 
purer life, and realize higher ideals of right and 
love than he has yet attained to. It is the ele- 
ment of the human constitution that has pro- 
duced noble and saintly characters and lives in 
every age of the world, and under all religious 
dispensations. All religious systems are but the 
efforts of this believing spirit to put itself into 
concrete and substantial forms. 

Such is faith in general. Christian faith is that 
same religious element, or believing and uplook- 
ing spirit, as especially called forth, directed, and 
shaped by Jesus Christ, by his teachings and his 
personal character and history and inspiring ap- 
peal and example, — the same believing and up- 
looking spirit as modified and developed by Him, 



One Faith. 



i6 3 



taking Him for spiritual Master, as one who knew 
God more profoundly than any other has known 
Him, His purposes, His law, His love ; as one 
who had a more distinct and sure feeling of the 
life to come than any other has had ; as one who 
knew better than any other what man should be 
and might become, and what it is infinitely de- 
sirable and blessed that he should be; as one 
more deeply inspired with divine wisdom than 
any other, and whose words and walk and life 
exhibit the highest beauty and perfection of hu- 
manity. And seeing and feeling that He presented 
the very pattern of a perfect life, that He was 
true and holy, and finding that through Him 
there comes to every one that turns to Him and 
cleaves to Him an inspiration that kindles what 
is best in man, even the desire of all excellence, 
of pardon and peace and a better life, imparts 
strength, awakens hope, quickens love, gives a 
voice to the prayer of faith, and brings on the 
repose of perfect trust. 

Christian faith is to accept Christ thus. It is 
a thing of degrees. This is what it would be, 
and is, in its most perfect and advanced stage ; 
but it is Christian faith in its feeble beginnings, 
even though it should comprehend far less than 
this. It is faith for the soul to take any hold of 
Him with reverent love, with any perception or 
feeling that God was with him, that He was good 
and the inspirer of goodness. He himself some- 
times commended persons for their faith, when 
they gave no other signs of it than a mere con- 



164 



One Faith. 



viction that God empowered Him to heal their 
diseases. " I have not found so great faith ; no, 
not in Israel," He said, concerning the centurion, 
who had shown no other manifestation of faith 
in Him than to express a confidence that He 
had but to speak the word and his sick servant 
at home would be healed. Even that speck and 
smallest germ of faith He knew was so genuine, 
and proceeded from such a believing spirit, that 
it would require but time and a further commu- 
nion to expand it into an influence which should 
fill the soul with the spiritual life and love. Slight 
as it was, it did recognize God in Christ, even 
though in the narrowest way, and in a physical 
way. It opened the door to higher inspirations 
in the centurion's heart and the soldier's faith. 
He called it faith, and rejoiced in it. 

In the view of liberal Christianity, the great 
error of Christendom has been to regard Christian 
faith as consisting in the belief of a set of theo- 
logical doctrines ; and then, if faith is, as all ad- 
mit it to be, the vital principle of the religious 
life, and if it is the belief of certain speculative 
opinions, then of course those opinions or doc- 
trines become vital and absolutely necessary to 
true religion in the soul. The conclusion is in- 
evitable if we admit the premises ; but we deny 
the premises. We deny that speculative opin- 
ions about Christ constitute the Christian faith. 
To clear this matter up we have nothing to do 
but to go back to Christ himself. In several in- 
stances he strongly commended persons for their 



One Faith. 



165 



faith, but we know the faith He spoke of was 
not a belief in the Trinity or Vicarious Atone- 
ment, or any of that class of doctrines. He had 
never said a word upon these subjects. He had 
never spoken of his own nature, never called Him- 
self by any other title than that modest one which 
He loved best — the Son of Man • had never 
spoken of his own blood and death, unless it 
were to give an intimation to his friends that He 
should not be long with them. He had only 
spoken such things as the Sermon on the Mount, 
and a few simple parables, illustrating the char- 
acter of good men and the love of God, and gone 
about comforting the afflicted and healing the 
sick and telling men of the heavenly Father, and 
what it was their duty and their joy to be and to 
do in all simplicity and purity of living, and how 
He knew that what He said was approved by God 
and was the very truth. This was all He had 
taught, — nothing that men would now call a the- 
ology or a scheme of salvation, — mere goodness 
and piety. He had said nothing about anything 
else. And yet those who had heard nothing else, 
and knew nothing else, received from him the 
hearty commendation of having faith, and a sav- 
ing faith. They did not even take in all that He 
had said, sometimes only a very little of it ; per- 
haps could appreciate, as we have seen, nothing 
more about Him than some beneficent act; and 
yet their simply coming to Him in a believing 
spirit, having so much sympathy with Him, so 
much readiness to listen to Him and learn of Him, 



One Faith. 



any such little bond of union with Him, He called 
faith, and was glad in it, and gave it his bene- 
diction, and so stamped it as Christian faith and 
a saving faith. 

And how should the standard or test of Chris- 
tian faith be of a different kind now from what 
He made it ? Was not his good enough and 
high enough ? What right has the disciple, man- 
aging his church in his name, to require such 
different tests from those of the Master ? Jesus 
was indeed no theologian, in the modern sense 
of the term. He had no idea of religion but as 
simple goodness. He had not faith according to 
the modern standards. 

I should be sorry to fall into the language of 
vulgar abuse, but it is the simple fact, and an in- 
structive one to consider, that if Jesus were now 
on earth, there is no evangelical church into which 
He could be admitted as a member by simply re- 
peating anything He said, or all that He said, 
when He was on earth. He would have to add 
something to that, assent to many doctrines which 
He never said a word about, or else be excluded 
as unsound in the faith. It sounds unkind to 
say that, but it is most manifestly true. If He 
should adhere to his own words or thoughts, not 
a church could admit Him as a brother, not a 
bishop could lay hands upon Him without violat- 
ing his rubric, not a synod could consistently 
license Him to preach the gospel. Not but that 
they love and honor Him as much as anybody 
can, and would fly to Him with rapture, if they 



One Faith. 



knew who or what He was ; but if they did not 
know that, and tried Him by their creeds and 
standards of faith, and He had nothing to say 
but just what He said there in Palestine, He 
would not pass ; they would have to reject Him. 
So false is the position in which good Christians 
have placed themselves by identifying faith with 
theological opinions, and not observing the broad 
distinction between them. Their opinions, the 
theology of those churches which I have referred 
to, may be absolutely true and sound ; that is not 
the question now ; but supposing them to be so, 
is it not obviously a great mistake to regard them 
as faith, and the only faith, when we see that 
such a view would exclude from among Chris- 
tians the Master of Christians himself, unless He 
would admit as the essentials of faith things 
which He had never said anything about, and 
which those whom He approved as having faith 
knew nothing about, except upon the most vio- 
lent hypothesis that He forebore to speak of the 
things most important to his religion, or that the 
most important things which He did say are not 
reported in his biography. It is a curious fact, 
— I say it not for boasting or for disparagement, 
but nobody can deny it, and it is a suggestive 
fact, and I wish it could be considered by those 
whom it most concerns, — that the Unitarian 
churches, and some others similarly constituted, 
are positively the only ones to which our Lord 
could be admitted if He were here in the flesh, 
unless He had wholly changed his views as to 
what faith is. 



i68 



One Faith. 



Let us not underrate the interest, the impor- 
tance, the intellectual necessity of a theology, and 
of speculative doctrines. The human mind, where 
it is developed into a state of activity, will, by a 
law of its nature, ponder and discuss those deep, 
mysterious questions which lie back of and around 
the sphere of the Christian revelation. It will 
strive to settle for itself those problems of being 
and of destiny which it has not pleased God to 
unfold clearly, and which Jesus Christ did not see 
fit to touch upon as belonging to his religion. A 
speculative theology there must be, and may well 
be ; and if there be one theology, there must be 
many. These are subjects upon which there can 
be no unanimity of opinion, and on which differ- 
ent minds, variously constituted and biased, come 
to different conclusions if they are left free, as 
God made them and meant them to be. 

There must be many theologies, but there can 
be only one Christian religion, — a diversity of 
dogmas, but one faith. The Bible itself contains 
more than one theology. The theology of James 
is different from that of Paul, and that of John 
different from them both, — and yet they have but 
one faith in common. They all look to Christ as 
with a single eye, and beneath the theologic veil 
which they severally threw over Him according to 
their mental idiosyncrasies, saw but one and the 
same Christ; one who showeth us the Father, his 
will and his love ; one who embodied in Himself 
all goodness, and inspired all goodness ; one 
whose heart was all obedience and trust, and de- 



One Faith. 



169 



sired to bring other hearts into harmony with his 
own ; one whose heart was a pure, undimmed 
flame of love and piety, which they felt kindling 
a like flame in their own. They had no difference 
of opinion as to the temper their Master would 
have them cherish, the life He would have them 
lead, the hope and joy He would have them feel. 
There was but one tie that bound them all to 
Him, — that of a reverent and confiding love, a 
• believing sympathy which drew them to Him, — 
the beautiful and sinless one, — whom to listen to 
and follow and resemble was to have Him for 
their Saviour, their inspiring guide on earth, their 
forerunner within the veil. There was but one 
faith in the hearts of them all. 

And so always, so now. There is a great di- 
versity of forms and opinions amongst Christians, 
and yet but one faith amongst them all. There 
is a loud jangle of disputation, but it is only theo- 
logical. The religion of one church or one man 
is, as far as it goes, in perfect harmony with the 
religion of any other church or man ; there is no 
difference, except that of more and less. It is 
true that one's theology gets mingled with his 
religion • his dogmatic opinions blend more or 
less with" the faith of the heart, and color it, and 
give a tone and direction to it, so that one man's 
religion shall look a different thing from another's, 
and when they discuss matters together it shall 
seem as if they agreed in nothing ; it is true that 
most of the discussion which goes on is about 
theology, while in matters of real religion there 



One Faith. 



is a silence and a reserve which seems to put 
them in the background ; and, as a consequence 
of this, many come to think that their theology 
is their religion, or something higher and better 
than religion, and that correctness of theological 
opinions is more important than goodness of 
heart and life. It is the theology that makes the 
noise and the show, while the faith that works 
below is silent, unproclaimed, and almost unob- 
served, because it makes no din or discord. The 
diversities are apparent, the unity is latent. And 
yet there are times when good men forget their 
superficial differences, and feel and recognize the 
deeper unity. There are occasions when the 
mere intellectual and dogmatic differences recede 
into their proper insignificance, postponed and 
forgotten, and the one faith mounts to its place 
of divine supremacy, and reveals the deeper one- 
ness of the heart, — innumerable occasions in 
every-day private life. 

I recall to mind one occasion of a rather pub- 
lic character, which illustrates my thought. A 
few years ago one of the great ocean steamers 
was crossing the Atlantic, with a very large com- 
pany on board, and among them many clergy- 
men, and others eminent in church affairs, who 
had been attending the world's convention in Lon- 
don. A terrible storm arose and continued long. 
" Thrice on deck," said the captain, " I thought 
destruction was inevitable ; each time a wave of 
such magnitude covered the ship that I thought 
it was all over with us." All on board expected 



One Faith. 



171 



death hour by hour. They saw their ship dis- 
mantled, deluged, and, as they believed, breaking 
to pieces before the fury of the elements. They 
gave themselves up for lost. It lasted thirty-six 
hours ; they had time to think. The passengers 
met at night in the cabin, — their last night of 
life, as they believed. They asked such as would 
to lead in prayer, and surely not a soul of them 
all was prayerless then. They listened together 
to the solemn and composing words of Scripture, 
and they desired, with common consent, if the 
storm would spare them long enough, to com- 
memorate their Saviour by the communion rite 
which He gave to his disciples. And so they 
gathered round the table and partook together 
of the symbols of the Redeemer's body and 
blood. They all felt comforted by the blessed 
ordinance, and many a bosom, before tossed with 
fear, was now tranquil through faith. " Oh, it was 
a night," — says the describer, — " a night and a 
communion to be long remembered." They sepa- 
rated and went apart in family groups or alone, 
to die. How was it that they could all sit down 
together to observe the ordinance, as if they were 
of one fold, knowing no differences ? On shore 
and in" safety they would not have done it. The 
Baptist would not sit down with Congregational- 
ists ; the High Churchman would not take the 
sacrament from any but a priest episcopally or- 
dained \ the Trinitarian could not join the Uni- 
tarian in that sacred observance. On shore they 
could not ; but they could there. And why ? 



172 



One Faith. 



Because on shore, in all fair weather, theology 
would be uppermost — opinions. But there, in 
the face of death, mere opinions and intellectual 
distinctions vanished from thought, and in that 
great and solemn exigency something diviner 
than opinion rose up, even faith, and faith is but 
one, and it made them one. It was no time for 
the quibbles of criticism, or the drawing of arti- 
ficial lines, or the setting up of speculative tests, 
or the assuming of doctrinal superiority. It was 
a time for the religious emotions to come into 
play, unincumbered, with opinion ; and those are 
the same in all men. They found, for the time, 
that there was but one faith. 

And so it is in a degree in the more common 
scenes of life. All good men find out now and 
then, and for the time, that whatever may be 
their diversities of opinion, they have but one 
faith, one religion. In religious people, their 
religion will now and then get the better of their 
theology. In seasons of great and overwhelming 
affliction the soul takes precedence of the intel- 
lect, and opinions are little thought of, and faith 
is everything ; and when any two mourn together, 
however they may have been divided in doctrine, 
the holy sympathies of sorrow bring their com- 
mon faith into the ascendant, and a common 
grief, a common consolation, a common hope, re- 
veals that they are one in heart, one in religion. 

In the immediate presence of death the depart- 
ing one forgets the distinctions of his theology, 
and reposes in faith, feeling that it is the same 



One Faith. 



173 



faith that soothes all pious and hopeful death- 
beds. In all deeds and enterprises of Christian 
love, when the heart goes forth in disinterested- 
ness, followed by foot and hand in errands of 
mercy, the faith which works by love grows para- 
mount, and theology is deposed, and they who 
meet and cooperate in such things find they have 
but one religion, and receive one and the same 
message and commandment from their common 
Master. 

In all the great hours of noble resolve and 
high aspiration, or cleansing repentance, or heart- 
felt prayer, when the spirit is wrestling with the 
soul, and eternal realities grow palpable, and 
duty looks sacred, and the love of God warms 
and shines round the soul, and the tie of brother- 
hood is re-knit, and the grace of God is pouring 
in, and the soul feels itself thereby growing whole 
cubits of stature in an hour, — who then thinks of 
dividing the lines of doctrine ? It is the hour in 
which faith triumphs, and a man discovers that 
all good men are his brethren in the faith, breth- 
ren to help and be helped by, brethren to learn 
from, to take inspiration and impart it, all dear 
alike to the one Father of spirits. 

The experiences of life working upon a believ- 
ing spirit and a susceptible heart tend to sub- 
ordinate opinion to faith, and break down the 
barriers of sect. I think I have observed that 
advancing age has a strong tendency to soften 
theological asperities, and efface intellectual dif- 
ferences. An old man or woman who is religious 



174 



One Faith. 



is seldom intolerant or uncharitable ; they are mel- 
lowed by experience ; it is shocking and painful 
where they are not. They are satisfied with good 
people, whatever their opinions, and it sounds 
strange and hard for them to say that God's fa- 
vor depends upon dogma. 

The intercourse of life, the sympathies of friend- 
ship and good neighborhood and kind relation- 
ships are constantly bringing good people together 
and showing them that in the great things of relig- 
ion they are one, and that the mere matters of 
fallible opinion that have divided them are tran- 
sient and insignificant compared with the deeper 
faith of the heart that unites them. The good 
affections are all on the side of faith • the con- 
science is on the side of faith all the tender and 
humane sympathies are on the side of faith • sor- 
row and death are on the side of faith ; and it 
were strange indeed if speculative opinions, the 
mere outside conjectures or fallible reasoning of 
the intellect, should always and forever stand 
against these. They cannot and do not. Relig- 
ion draws men together stronger and faster, we 
trust, than theology can put them asunder; and 
the faith of the heart is more than a match in 
the long run for the pride of dogma and the dis- 
tractions of dispute. 

Such is faith ; everywhere one and the same 
thing, colored on the outside by doctrine, but not 
changed in its inner essence. It is that which all 
good men hold in common. It is that in the soul 
which, amid all diversities of opinion, feels after 



One Faith. 



175 



God, bows in reverence, and looks up in trust. 
It is that which yearns towards the glorious and 
beautiful Christ, and stretches out its hand to take 
hold of his hand, and sits down at his feet to 
learn of Him. It is that which reveals a brother 
to pity and to save, in every man that lives, and 
twice a brother in every good and pure and loving 
man. It is that which kindles pure desire and 
spiritual aspiration, and braces to great resolves, 
and breathes the love of goodness through the 
heart, and sheds abroad in it the love of God. It 
lies back of all theologies ; it breathes in the true 
worship of all churches, and runs its fine veins 
and lovely tints through the skeleton of all hon- 
est creeds. Where it is present it sanctifies all 
opinions ; where it is absent all opinions are but 
a sham and a delusion. Where it is strong it is 
victory ; where it is feeble it is humility and hope. 
In the still closet hour it is a prayer, abroad amid 
duties and trials it is a law, in human intercourse 
it is love, in temptation it is a shield, in suffering 
it is patience, in sorrow it is peace, in death it is 
a vision of the heavenly glories. 

There is but one faith ; it is the soul of all 
goodness. Let us pray for it and cherish it, and 
recognize it wherever it appears, however disfig- 
ured by errors of opinion ; and with it put on 
charity and meek tolerance, and the liberal spirit 
and that crowning fact of the Christian life, — a 
sense of the universal unity and brotherhood. 
January 29, i860. 



XIII. 



THE WINDOWS TOWARDS JERUSALEM. 

Now when Daniel knew that the writing was signed, he went into his 
house ; and his windows being open in his chamber toward Jerusalem, 
he kneeled upon his knees three times a day, and prayed, and gave 
thanks before his God, as he did aforetime. — Daniel vi. 10. 

" T TIS windows being open toward Jerusa- 
JL J. lem." That is the clause that arrests 
my attention. 

Some six hundred years before Christ, Judea 
was conquered, and Jerusalem sacked by the 
Assyrian king. The flower of the Jewish people 
were carried away captives to Babylon, and after- 
wards the masses of the people shared the same 
fate. Daniel was among the first that went. It 
was in his early youth that this captivity befel 
him. He appears to have been treated in the 
main with kindness and distinction. By the force 
of his abilities and his character he won the con- 
fidence of the king. Under Oriental despotisms 
it was not uncommon, and has not been in mod- 
ern times, for captives and slaves to be promoted 
to high places of power and honor. This was 
Daniel's fortune. Absolute monarchs are capri- 
cious, and the most successful of their courtiers 
must encounter enmities and rivalries. Daniel 



The Windows towards Jerusalem. 177 

sometimes rises to the highest and again falls to 
the lowest, — one day sitting next to the sover- 
eign, and the next thrown to the lions to be de- 
voured. On the whole his life was outwardly 
prosperous, and he maintained well his high po- 
sition, — one of the men whom it is hard for 
conspiracies to overreach, and for jealousy and 
power to put down and keep down. But while 
he thus maintained himself as prince and minister 
of a great empire, his heart remained a Hebrew 
heart. In spite of all the blandishments and co- 
ercions of idolatry, he clave piously to the God 
of his fathers. The splendors of Babylon did 
not wean him from the fond memories of his na- 
tive Zion. Though so early transplanted, Juclea 
remained the country of his affections and the 
home of his aspirations. A thorough Jew as he 
was, no length of time could transform him into 
anything but a Jew, or transfer his heart's fealty 
from the Jordan to the Euphrates, — always an 
exile, looking back fondly and forward yearn- 
ingly, to the only spot that a true son of Israel 
ever felt to be his home, though but dimly re- 
membering it, perhaps, and scarcely hoping ever 
to see it. 

I do not propose to follow the fortunes of this 
Prophet of Israel, or relate the incidents of his 
life spent there in that great heathen capital ; but 
that little allusion to the windows of his cham- 
ber seems to me to suggest thoughts enough for 
a discourse. I think it a very significant and 
touching allusion, telling a great deal more than 
12 



178 The Windows towards Jerusalem. 

the writer thought of. The writer seemed only to 
be thinking of the striking incident of the lions' 
den, and how the prophet came to be thrown into 
it, and what a wondrous deliverance he had from 
that almost sure destruction. But in these few 
words about the windows he unwittingly opens 
up a revelation of the most interior life of the 
illustrious exile, — a far larger chapter of his real 
heart-history than could be contained in the nar- 
rative of a hundred court conspiracies, or an en- 
counter with all the lions that ever crouched or 
roared through the jungles of Asia. 

In his private hours, the hours he could spare 
for meditation and devotion, Daniel would go 
apart to his chamber and open the windows that 
faced towards the Holy City of his people. He 
would ascertain exactly in what direction it lay, 
under what star by night, in a range with what 
tower or tree by day. There, to his mind's eye, 
and almost to his fleshly eye, the City of David 
lay spread out, set in its encircling hills. There 
it was, just so many leagues off, away in the 
west. As he looked towards the very spot, it 
became a very real and vivid presence to him. 
The windows assisted his thoughts ; sitting there, 
or kneeling, and looking forth, his mind could 
travel over in an instant, and annihilate the di* 
viding space ; he could come into immediate 
communion with the revered saints and heroes 
of his race ; he could go and sit down with Abra- 
ham at his tent door, and walk with Isaac at 
even-tide, and Jacob among the flocks of Laban. 



The Windows towards Jerusalem. 179 

The wonders that Jehovah had wrought through 
Joseph and Moses and Joshua and Samuel were 
his daily reading, from out that window. There 
stretched the walls of Zion, and there soared the 
temple of Solomon, visible to his abstracted 
gaze. There curled the smoke of sacrifice, and 
there was the shining over the mercy-seat. Look- 
ing thither he feasted his mind on the great and 
tender memories of a wonderful history. He 
could return to the house of his own fathers, the 
home of his childhood, and renew all the asso- 
ciations of those tender years. ^ There he could 
pray most heartily, for he kneeled facing the very 
altar he had pressed in his youth. If his faith 
in the God of his fathers ever faltered or dimmed 
amid the idolatries of Babylon, he had but to 
look forth from that window to rekindle the old 
fire in the heart, and renew his vows to Him who 
had chosen his seat on the heights of Zion. 
There, too, he would sit and look, thinking over 
and over, in fond prophetic anticipation, of the 
time that was sure to come when his afflicted 
people would go back from their captivity, and 
rebuild their broken walls. That road, stretching 
there before him to the westward, was the road 
they would take, and those hills yonder, through 
which they would defile, would resound with the 
shouts of their deliverance and with those old 
songs of Zion that they never would sing till they 
should return, and their harps should be taken 
down from the willows where they hung mute till 
that time should come. And come it would, he 



180 The Windows towards ^Jerusalem. 

saw and knew. Looking out of his window to 
the very spot, he saw the visions of the proph- 
ets becoming realized, as it were, before his gaze. 
He saw the dear city rising again from its ashes, 
and putting on new glories ; he saw greater 
prophets arising there to lead the people, and 
One, greatest of all, bearing the Messiah's com- 
mission. He himself might not share in person 
the triumphs of that great day, — indeed he 
was getting too old for that, — but it was none 
the less present and joyous to his thought. There 
lay the future history of his race, — not here in 
Babylon, but there across the hills in Jerusalem. 
He looked forth and saw it, and dwelt upon it, 
and the great anticipation was his soul's life, the 
most living part of his life. 

Thus it was that the exile, instead of pining 
from homesickness, and despairing under a gall- 
ing servitude, kept a window open looking to- 
wards all that was bright and glad to his imag- 
ination. That window was the passage out of 
which his mind passed from bondage and degra- 
dation to freedom and happiness. While he could 
open that window, not the Assyrian king, but the 
God of Israel, was his Lord. There he could sit 
and look forth, and feast himself on the glorious 
memories and mounting hopes and all sweet im- 
aginations of home and country. Through that 
window he could escape from the sins and dis- 
gusts of a foul idolatry, and all the hardships and 
perils of a capricious despotism, the fiery furnace, 
and the lions' den, and go shade himself under 



The Windows towards Jerusalem. 181 

the vines and olive-trees of Judea, and cool him- 
self in the sacred Jordan, and meditate on the 
side of Olivet, and be peaceful and free. Hated 
Babylon did not hold him ; his real life was not 
lived there, so long as he had windows that looked 
towards Jerusalem, and he could open them at 
pleasure, and through that splendid clairvoyance 
— a spiritual faculty which all men partake of — 
could transport himself to his spirit's home, and 
dwell among its ideals, and make all the past, 
and all the future, and all the invisible, present 
and his very own. 

I think there is a great lesson for us all in 
that little mention of Daniel's opening his win- 
dow towards his Jerusalem. We are all more 
or less rigorously held captive by the circum- 
stances of our outward condition ; we are never 
quite free to be where we would. Compulsions 
and limitations press upon us. The exigencies 
of our lot imprison us. We are always conscious 
of a sort of homesick longing for some other 
and better state, something that has been, or 
that might be, or will be, or that at least looks 
possible and desirable. There is almost always 
a certain degree of hardness and confinement, 
and galling restriction, in the immediate circum- 
stances that hem us in. And now and then it 
is very hard, — to some persons continuously 
hard, through circumstances of severe labor, or 
of bitter disappointment, or desolating sorrows, 
or enslaving temptations and habits, fears, per- 
ils, sufferings, despondencies, of whatever kind. 



T82 The Windows towards Jerusalem. 

Many a man's present actual condition is a per- 
fect Babylon, a bondage, a state of exile from 
the soul's freedom and peace, a shutting out 
from all the fondest desires of the heart. And 
in the most favored lot there are exigencies that 
gall the limbs and hem in the liberties of the 
soul, and expose it to many an irksome endur- 
ance, and many an Assyrian humiliation, and 
many a sense of baffled endeavors and ham- 
pered faculties and darkened hopes. The im- 
mediate circumstances, the actual condition of 
the present moment, is never, for anybody, suf- 
ficient for his liberty, his contentment, his as- 
pirations, or for his spiritual health and Chris- 
tian character. We cannot live well or wisely 
or happily, unless we have the means of escap- 
ing occasionally in spirit, and to a greater or 
less distance, from these daily scenes and straits 
and surroundings. There must be windows to 
our chamber of life, looking afar, and towards 
fairer scenes. And there are such windows pro- 
vided, and we must open them, and keep them 
open, and sit at them, and kneel at them, and 
look away into the horizon, and breathe the airs 
that come from the distance, and so win freedom 
and expansion for our lives. 

I have read somewhere that it is, or should be, 
a high principle of art, that in painting an inte- 
rior view of any room or building, there should 
always be represented some outlookinto the out- 
door world. Some window or some door left 
ajar. If this be wanting, the picture will not 



The Windows towards Jerusalem. 183 

give pleasure, the writer said, and the spectator 
will have a feeling of confinement and of suffo- 
cation. But give him an opening, so he can look 
out, whether it be over city roofs, or into green 
landscapes, or the blue sky, — somehow into the 
infinite out-doors, — and he breathes freely, and 
even the prison cell looks then like a part of 
God's world, and a little Dutch kitchen, which 
so many artists have represented, looks genial 
and comfortable and home-like ; and without 
such outlet a palace hall on the canvas will feel 
close and undesirable. 

I do not know how true this may be in art; 
I think it must be true, because the same princi- 
ple is so very sound and so very essential in all 
human life. There is no condition of life in 
which a human being can live happily or nobly, 
unless it have windows for the soul to look 
through, and breathe through, commercing with 
things fair and free in the distance. Such win- 
dows are provided by the Great Architect. They 
are memory and imagination and sympathy and 
hope and religious faith. These are the windows 
to be opened, and to sit at, and kneel at, like the 
exiled Hebrew in his chamber at Babylon. 

We sometimes wonder, perhaps, at seeing per- 
sons who appeared to have everything about them 
to enjoy, their circumstances all very admirable, 
beautifully housed and conditioned, who yet are 
not happy, and their life is not lovely or noble. 
Probably it is because they have no windows to 
their lot, or do not open them, and no magnifi- 



184 The Windows towards Jerusalem. 

cence of architecture or beauty of furnishing can 
make a house look well, or feel well, without win- 
dows looking to the grass and the blue of hills 
and sky. And we sometimes wonder, too, how 
people not well situated, with a hard, unlovely 
environment immediately about them, yet live in 
it contentedly, pleasantly, and admirably. It is 
because there are windows to their room, and 
they open them towards the fair and grand things 
of the universe. 

We must open our windows, — that of memory, 
for instance. It is very pleasant and very profit- 
able to hold frequent converse with scenes and 
days gone by. Though they may not have been 
altogether lovely and agreeable in the passing, 
yet time and distance lend them an enchantment. 
When we have gone on far in life, it is good to 
look back to the days of childhood, to early ties 
and the early home. They look bright to us now 
as they stretch back into the fair morning of our 
life. They bring back tenderness of feeling, and 
much of the lost simplicity and purity of the 
heart ; they keep the heart young amid the age- 
ing and withering influences of the present. Old 
people who are cheerful and pleasant, we gen- 
erally find, are fond of talking about the old 
times, the old scenes of their childhood, early 
recollections, early pleasures, and even early 
hardships and sorrows. They sit much at that 
window of their chamber which looks towards 
that Jerusalem. When people forget their child- 
hood, and care no more for it, their heart is hard- 



The Windows towards yerusalem. 185 

ening ; they are getting closed in and stifled be- 
tween the four walls of their present condition ; 
be that condition what it may, it is cramping and 
gloomy unless it have windows. We must carry 
along with us all that we can of our young expe- 
riences, affections, and memories ; never part 
company with them. It is like looking out into 
the sunrise, carrying something of the morning's 
freshness through our whole day ; it is a looking 
away over green slopes, stretching into the east. 
We should never let that window get closed. 

Then, next, there is the window of the sym- 
pathies. The house we live in, — or our actual, 
material condition of life, — however favored, 
will be narrow and dark unless we have the 
means and the habit of keeping up communica- 
tion with scenes and interests beyond it ; and 
though it be narrow and dark in itself, it can be 
made airy and bright by having an open window 
of sympathy. Sympathy in some direction there 
should always be, intellectual or affectionate, or 
both ; sympathy with something apart from us 
and beyond us. That sympathy may take the 
form of a love of nature, its beautiful sights and 
sounds, its flowers and fields and woods, its 
chemical mysteries, its marvelous organic com- 
binations, the grand expanse, or some little nook, 
of this vast temple of nature, a taste for some- 
thing that is lovely or sublime, which proves to 
so many a window to let in fresh air and sweet 
sunshine, that converts the grimmest walls, even 
of a poor condition, into the pleasantest of homes. 



1 86 The Windows towards Jerusalem. 

The love of nature or of art in any of its modes 
and forms opens the window towards a very fair 
Jerusalem. 

Or it may be a sympathy with the character 
and doings of men, the march of human history, 
the majesty of old heroic times, the loveliness of 
times that look pastoral and golden to us, charac- 
ters that we delight to dwell with, though they 
have long since left the earth and we can reach 
them only through our sympathies, — history, bi- 
ography, glowing intellectual retrospection, bring- 
ing all the dead back, living, into our presence. 

Or it may be the sympathy with the more ab- 
struse and abstract knowledge, with the great 
problems of thought that have engaged the high- 
est minds in all times ; stores of wisdom, the 
pleasures of strong, intellectual exercise, success- 
ful expeditions among the little islands or into 
the great continents of truth. Many a Babylo- 
nian lot in life, desolate and hard in itself, has 
been cheered and exalted for those who have the 
taste and the opportunity for such studies. 

Or it may be the sympathy with living persons, 
and present interests lying just outside of us, or 
far around us. An interest in the goings on of 
the nations and the great world, or in the welfare 
of neighbors and friends, or in objects of com- 
passion and charity, good movements for the 
amelioration of the condition of many, or a few. 
Sympathy, in some form of disinterestedness, 
enables us to look out, look away, so that our 
personal lot in life shall not become a dark and 



The Windows towards Jerusalem. 187 

windowless dungeon of selfishness, which for him 
who lives in it, though he build it ever so large, 
and adorn it ever so much, is no better than a 
prison, and will stifle him, and make his life mean 
and hard and wretched, be it ever so fine look- 
ing, and covet it who will. 

Then, next, there is the window of the imag- 
ination. This is like an oriel window, many-sided, 
looking in various directions, with front-lights and 
side-lights. If we open it wide it lets in beauty 
from all sources into the chamber of our life. 
Everybody's life is, at the best, meagre and bar- 
ren without some touch of the poetic element to 
transfigure it, to soften its roughness, and smooth 
its sharp edges, and make it look large and no- 
ble, by the mysterious laws of spiritual perspec- 
tive. Poetry is no mere thing of books and 
rhymes, but a quality of the soul. It is the fac- 
ulty of visiting sometimes and bringing home 
the ideals of things fairer and better than these 
coarse, material realities, that make up the hard 
circumstances of daily life. Children have it 
when they are able to convert a rough stick into 
a war-steed, a little torn rag into a nation's ban- 
ner, a piece of tin into the sword of Wallace or 
Saladin or Washington, a little corner of a barn- 
chamber into the court of Zenobia or Maria The- 
resa. Poor people have it, and are looking out 
of that window when you see them smiling with 
some ethereal expression amid their coarse labors 
and squalid environment. They are looking away 
at some forms of beauty which, as they look, 
come up to them and become their own. 



1 88 The Windows towards Jerusalem. 

Most happy in its constitution or its training 
is the mind that has a large possession of beauti- 
ful images ever passing through it ; is compan- 
ioned along its path, which may be a rough one, 
by many lovely forms gathering to its side from 
every quarter of the horizon. It peoples the 
narrow chamber of its earthly lot with visitors 
from every realm of creation, makes its loneliest 
hours sociable, its hardest toils lightened by in- 
visible helps, and enjoys the whole universe for 
its heritage. Who could live with any cheerful- 
ness or elevation of mind without some such win- 
dowed out-look through which to hold communion 
with the distant and the ideal and the fair, the 
better things, the sweeter possibilities, and bring 
them into his presence, and incorporate them 
with the dry and narrow actualities of his con- 
dition ? 

Another of these windows is hope, — and sad 
for us when that gets closed. The present is not 
enough for anybody. It is one of the great en- 
dowments of the human soul that it is always too 
large for its position, that it never finds its per- 
fect repose and satisfaction just here and now, 
but is empowered to anticipate and appropriate 
a better futurity. The natural attitude of the 
human soul is an expectant one. A better time 
coming is an inheritance of which the most miser- 
able cannot be despoiled, and which the most 
favored have need of. The healthy heart feels 
that it has not yet learned to enjoy its blessings 
to the full, nor yet received the best blessings 



The Windows towards Jerusalem. 189 

that are meant for it. Youth looks onward to 
the successes it is to win, the ties it is to form, 
its future acquisitions of knowledge, of affection, 
of honor or of wealth or usefulness ; and when 
these hopes fade away, either in fulfillment or 
disappointment, others succeed them; and when 
the whole procession is closed and earth and 
time can offer no more, the poor wayfarer can at 
least sit down at that window, looking off into 
the calm twilight of the west and indulge its 
soothing anticipations of a deeper repose. As 
long as there is life, we say, there is hope ; and 
the reverse of that saying is still truer and better, 
— as long as there is hope there is life. We can 
bear a disappointment if a new hope will but 
spring up in the place of the old one. We can 
bear adversity so long as there is hope of deliver- 
ance. We can suffer patiently in the expectation 
of a relief and a soothing to come. We can let 
the sun go down in darkness as long as we can 
turn and wait for its rising again in the east. 
We can bear to live in the narrow chamber of 
earthly circumstances ; ill-furnished and cold it 
may be, and the doors all barred, with only a 
prison fare on the board, and the naked walls to 
look at, if only that window is wide open and 
can look out towards some far Jerusalem of our 
desires and let in the light and air and warmth, 
coming thence to refresh and sustain us. 

Lastly, there is the window of religious faith. 
That looks towards the New Jerusalem. It opens 
towards the heavens ; it is the broad sky-light of 



190 The Windows towards yemsalem. 

our earthly house. This world, with all its pos- 
sessions and its hopes, is but a poor and close 
residence of the soul without the expectation of 
another and a better. All the other windows, 
looking into scenes however beautiful, will get 
closed at last, and the light will darken over every 
brightest landscape, and we must have light from 
above, or be dark indeed. We must open, and 
keep open, that window in the roof, through that 
catch the heavenly airs, and light that never 
fadeth; through that look up from our earthly 
chambers, darkened with pain and grief, and 
made lonesome by bereavements, and chilled by 
disappointments, and all the fair pictures that 
have hung upon their walls swept away, and the 
floor hard and rough ; look up into the heavenly 
city and see its golden pavements, and its gates 
of pearl, and its walls of jasper, and its seven 
lamps burning before the throne, and catch the 
notes of its sweet music, and witness the joys of 
the redeemed, and loving ones reunited after 
parting, and dwelling together in those happy 
mansions with God and the Lamb, where is no 
more hunger nor thirst, nor pain, nor tears ; and 
there is no need of the sun, for the glory of God 
doth lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof, 
and the gates of it shall not be shut by day, and 
there shall be no night there. 

Keep that window open, and the angels shall 
descend through it on their invisible wings, and 
people your hard, earthly lot with their comfort- 
ing presences, and sing their songs to you in your 



The Windows tozvards Jerusalem. 191 

loneliness, and lighten all your burdens, and com- 
fort all your griefs. Keep that window open, and 
it is as though the roof of your hard, earthly con- 
dition were lifted up, and you already dwelt in 
the skies, and sat down at the great feast. 

Keep all these windows open, looking towards 
one and another of the fair Jerusalems of thought 
and love and faith. And let us not lose the prac- 
tical lesson of our subject amid the mazes of 
metaphor which our text has involved us in. 
Keep alive and active the great faculties of mem- 
ory and sympathy and imagination and hope and 
faith. Let them do their great work for us, and 
it matters little what our earthly lot is. We have 
then all nature and truth and beauty, — the past, 
the future, God and heaven, present with us for 
our own. No matter, then, what or where the 
chamber is that we live in, its open windows give 
us everything, and the four walls, that will look 
so narrow and confining, spread apart to our in- 
ner eye till they comprehend the universe. Then, 
if we prosper, we shall not become worldly and 
sordid ; if we suffer we shall not be disheartened ; 
if we rejoice we shall not be frivolous nor selfish \ 
and if we are loving we shall love the beautiful 
and the good ; if we are stinted in our fare, we 
have meat to eat which others know not of ; if 
we are sick, we still breathe the airs of spiritual 
health ; if we are lonely, we have still myriads 
of fair faces smiling upon us ; if we die, there is 
a convoy of angels awaiting us, to bear us up to 
the realms of truer life. 



192 The Windows towards Jerusalem. 

Keep open the windows. From every home- 
sick and oppressive Babylon look out towards 
some fair and dear Jerusalem, — forth from the 
bitter Euphrates to some sweet Jordan ; from 
every Assyrian bondage to some free and happy 
Canaan. And when all the others must be closed 
at last, there is yet that one, opening the widest, 
opening upon the fairest scenes of all, upon the 
New Jerusalem. 



i860. 



XIV. 



OH, THAT I KNEW! 

Oh, that I knew where I might find Him! — Job xxiii. 3. 

THE afflicted patriarch, overwhelmed with ca- 
lamity, in poverty and loneliness and dis- 
ease, bereft of every earthly good that man holds 
dear, had surely enough to bear. But besides all 
this he is goaded to madness by his officious 
friends, who tell him he must have brought it all 
upon himself by his sins, for which God is pun- 
ishing him. This he vehemently denies. This 
accusation is too much for his patience ; he can- 
not sit still under it ; he wants to appeal directly 
to God ; carry his case before Him, and get him- 
self vindicated from the stinging charge. But 
how get his case before that tribunal ? Where is 
that Great Judge ? How come to Him and be 
heard and justified ? There is deepest pathos, as 
well as "bitter agony, in that eager, pleading, baf- 
fled cry : " Oh, that I knew where I might find 
Him ! " He stretches out his trembling, emaci- 
ated hands, gropingly, if haply he may feel after 
Him and find Him. He turns his eye-balls, dim 
with tears, and strained with looking, up to the 
clouds, if so he may catch some glimpse of the 
13 



194 Ok, that I knew ! 



majestic presence enthroned there. He calls out 
in the piteous tones of a lost child crying for its 
mother, — such tones as he would think, any one 
would think, must bring an answering word, even 
from the dumb rocks and hills, much more from 
the all-pitying Father. But no, it is all in vain. 
No vision, no touch, do voice comes in answer, 
He falls back into his ashes and his darkness, 
ready to despair, saying, " Behold, I go forward, 
but He is not there, and backward, but I cannot 
perceive Him ; on the left hand, where He doth 
work, but I cannot behold Him ; He hideth Him- 
self on the right hand, that I cannot see Him." 
And so the poor sufferer must suffer on. The 
hearing must be postponed ; he must bide his 
time. Jehovah will not come at his call, to vin- 
dicate his character, or put an end to his woes. 
It is a severe denial ; there is almost cruelty in 
it, but he must bear it, with only such comfort as 
he can find in his consciousness of rectitude, and 
only such patience as he could derive from his 
own strength, aided only by such confidence as 
he may feel in the invisible help and support of 
God. He cannot find God in any such sense or 
degree as his oppressed and grieving heart yearns 
for. He must suffer on, and he will, with as 
brave a heart as a man may, only there will keep 
breaking out, or breathing out, with every sigh 
of grief, and every groan of misery, a longing, 
plaintive cry, "Oh, that I knew where I might 
find him ! " 

We have here, in this good man's cry, so long- 



Oh, that I knew / 



195 



ing, so pathetic, so ineffectual, the type of a very 
common spiritual experience among men, always 
and everywhere. I believe that among those who 
have sufficient spiritual life to think or care any- 
thing about the subject, it is a common matter 
of wonder and regret that spiritual realities and 
religious truths are not made more palpable to the 
human mind, more certain, more assured and 
unquestionable matter of fact, like the material 
world, and the facts of nature, and the present 
life. Since a preeminent importance is every- 
where attached to these spiritual realities, why 
are they left liable to such anxious doubts ? Why 
such dim perceptions of them, so that the mind 
does not grasp them with a definite and steady 
hold, and they may even fade out into a tran- 
sient, and sometimes even a permanent unreality ? 
Why are they left open to downright denial ? 
Why should it be that even when the understand- 
ing accepts them the heart may yet fail to feel 
with any distinctness or constancy their actuality 
and their influence ? Or when the heart does 
instinctively turn to them and accept them, the 
understanding interposes its difficulties and brings 
in distrust? And even when the understanding 
and the heart consent together, the resulting faith 
is more or less vague, fitful, and liable to eclipses, 
not equal to sight and handling, when, judging 
by the soul's needs and cravings, it should be 
more than equal to sight or handling. We are 
ready to say that if the truths of religion are 
more momentous than any others, they ought to 



196 



Oh, that I knew ! 



be more imperatively recognizable, and more in- 
disputably established than any others ; and some 
perhaps are led to say, seeing they are left so 
vague, invisible, questionable, " Away with them, 
let us not dream any more about them, seeing at 
best it is but a dream." 

And even those most piously inclined, and most 
tenacious of their faith, do often long for more 
clearness, more positiveness, so that it might not 
grow dim, unsubstantial, or even utterly fade 
away, as it sometimes will, in the soul's pressing 
straights. 

Sometimes, when we feel utterly weak and 
prostrate, and want religious strength ; when we 
are overwhelmed with affliction, and need the 
comforts of religion, and need to have them 
solid, sure, and all-brightening ; when this world's 
blessings and supports seem to fall utterly away 
from us, and we need to feel that another world 
is a sure possession, better than this, and palpa- 
ble, and close to us ; under such experiences we, 
too, are ready to cry out : " Oh, that I knew where 
I might find Him ! " Oh, why does He not reveal 
his presence unmistakably ? Why should I not 
be permitted to see Him sitting there in his glo- 
rious heavens, and turning a kindly eye upon me 
his suffering child ? Why does He not write his 
name upon the firmament, for me to read it and 
know that He wrote it ? Why does He not speak 
to me, breathing gracious words into the ear of 
my heart, that I may know his voice as uner- 
ringly as I know my mother's, or my best friend's ? 



Oh, that I knew ! 



Why should I not feel his very hand held out to 
me and grasping my own ? Why should I not 
see that infinite love as I would see it, and as 
alone it can satisfy me to see it, shining in the 
benignity of a veritable countenance turned upon 
me ? 

And then, again, why should I not be permit- 
ted to look into that fair world which I am taught 
that I shall enter upon when this body is cast 
off? Oh, that the heavens would open to me, 
that I might see the angels and the just made 
perfect, gathered there in their shining robes, and 
rejoicing in a deathless life, and beckoning me 
up to join their sweet company ! Why may I not 
be permitted to see the glorified spirits ascending 
and descending on the heavenly ladders, and at 
least to look upon and listen to the glad festivi- 
ties of that marriage supper of the Lamb ? If 
indeed my Maker is disposed to give me perfect 
comfort amid my many sorrows, perfect support 
under my heavy burdens, and strength to do all 
my work, why not show me these things in open, 
unchanging vision, in absolute knowledge. Him- 
self, his heaven, his love, and all the glories and 
felicities of that supernal kingdom for which He 
has destined me. I should murmur no more, 
faint no more, and weep no more. Oh, that I 
might see and know all now ! Oh, that the silence 
of eternity may be broken, and the great dome 
that arches over the spiritual universe part asun- 
der to my weary, aching eyes ! 

But there is no answer to our cry. The stars 



Oh, that I knew 1 



keep shining, the winds whispering, but all inar- 
ticulate. The cloud-drapery of the sky keeps on 
folding and spreading itself; but if they clothe 
they also hide the person of God. If the heav- 
enly choirs are singing their joyous chants, our 
ears are holden that we should not hear them. 
Though we plead for the sights and sounds of the 
heavenly spheres, no glimpse is afforded us, and 
the everlasting silence reigns unbroken. Though 
we should wear away the stones with our bended 
knees in the importunity of prayer, no answer 
comes to eye or ear, and we are left to grope on 
as we can, so wearily, so darkly, with only such 
poor dim faith as we can attain to from out of the 
reasonings of the understanding, or the intuitions 
of the heart. 

Why should this be so ? Why is that truth kept 
back from us when we need it so much ? Is not 
God too reticent for a God of love ? Or is it that 
we refuse or neglect to avail ourselves of such 
means of knowledge as we possess, and are blind 
because we will not see, and deaf because we will 
not listen, and are left ignorant and doubting 
through an- evil heart of unbelief ? 

I know it is the usual and conventional way of 
the pulpit to lay all the blame of this dimness 
and halting of faith upon man. And no doubt 
he often, through his own fault, comes short in 
some degree of the positiveness of conviction 
which he might have, and that he himself does 
much to darken the glass through which spiritual 
things are to be seen. But still let us try to be 
just to man as well as to God. 



Oh, that I knew ! 



199 



For my part, I believe that the Creator never 
intended that we should know spiritual facts con- 
cerning Himself and the future state with the 
same distinctness with which we know the mate- 
rial facts of this world. He has purposely drawn 
a veil over them, not to conceal them wholly, but 
to make them less palpable. It is by his ap- 
pointment that we have to see them as through 
a glass darkly, dimly, — but glimpses and intima- 
tions rather than a distinct vision, through our 
hopes rather than through proofs. And so far 
from this appointment detracting from his wis- 
dom and goodness, I think it illustrates both. It 
is best as it is. We know by many proofs that 
this world is intended to be a place of discipline 
for man, so arranged with reference to him as to 
make it not as comfortable and as pleasant as 
possible, but to train his faculties, and develop 
-his strength by a vigorous discipline, — vigorous 
even to the point of pain and severity. We can 
conceive that the spiritual world might have been 
made so manifest to us now as to take away all 
the disciplinary character of the present world, 
and this life cease to be hard enough to do its 
office in educating us to manliness and virtue. 
God provides against this failure by veiling that 
future world. 

It is intended that while we live in this world 
we should do its work, take an interest in its 
affairs, study its lessons, love what is beautiful 
and good in it, and learn to bear what is hard in 
it, conform to its natural laws. And if this is the 



200 



Ok, that I knew ! 



plan, then of course another world far more glori- 
ous which we are to enter hereafter and very soon, 
would not be set right before us, wide open and 
plainly visible. That would defeat the plan ; it 
would distract us from the present scene, fill us 
with excited expectation, make us too impatient 
to be gone from here, or else too patient in stay- 
ing, knowing we shall go so soon. We should be 
unfitted for our work here and our enjoyments. 
This fine garden of the world would not be duly 
tilled, and they who are set to till it with severe 
toil would become idlers and weaklings, as those 
children are apt to be who are born to brilliant 
expectations in life, assured of fortune and all 
worldly blessings without an effort. No, let that 
life be veiled as it is, so that we may do our part 
in this heartily. 

But, then, would it not be well that in bearing 
the hardships and griefs of this world we should 
have the supports and consolations derived from 
the sight of the future w r orld ? No, it would not 
be well, as far as we can see. Hopes, anticipa- 
tions of that world it is desirable to have, and 
those we do have ; but vision, knowledge, distinct 
and assured ? No, it would not be well. We 
should lose the discipline of life ; our sorrows 
would be too easily comforted, pain would too 
nearly cease to be pain ; the world would not be 
the school of patience and perseverance which it 
is, and is meant to be. The vigor of manliness 
would cease out of life ; there would be no robust 
characters formed. The graces of humility and 



Oh, that I knew ! 



20 r 



resignation, and meek submission, and pious trust 
would be wanting; all heroism would disappear ; 
martyrdom would lose its crown, and self-sacrifice 
be dispossessed of its nobleness, and the human 
soul everywhere flat out into the mere nerveless 
ecstasy of idle and fruitless contemplation. Those 
persons who, here and there, have attained to an 
extraordinary, abnormal state of spiritual convic- 
tions, and who have thought that they have seen 
God and Christ, and the angels and all the heav- 
enly realities, palpable about and around them, — 
they have not been good specimens of humanity ; 
they have not done their work well in the world. 
Sometimes they have despised this fair creation ; 
sometimes they have lived in perpetual, unhealthy 
excitement ; sometimes in useless, morbid dream- 
ing ; sometimes eager to get out of the world, 
and sometimes living in it as if they were already 
transferred to another. They have neglected their 
bodies, their minds have grown weak, they have 
scorned the every-day work of life, and been poor 
exemplars of manly duty and endurance. It is 
against nature, and against God's plan for one to 
see and know, or to think that he sees and knows, 
the things of God and of eternity as palpably as 
the things of humanity and of time. Doubtless 
it would be very pleasant; but mere pleasantness 
is not the thing. Life, action, duty, manliness, 
patience, trustfulness, — these are the fruits that 
the Creator would reap and gather from the fields 
of this world ; therefore He lets down the veil to 
hide the next world. 



202 



Oh, that I knew ! 



We do not seek to initiate our children in their 
early days into all the mysteries, labors, cares, 
passions, and trials of mature life. We know it 
is the worst thing we could do for them. Rather 
we let them have their child-world to themselves ; 
we respect and cherish their ignorance as their 
best defense and happiest nurture. They get 
glimpses of what is coming, but full vision of it ? 
— God forbid. And just so God treats us in 
respect to the future world, — keeps us children 
in reference to it, and we can see that He is very 
wise in this matter. 

And yet, while the facts of the spiritual world 
are thus shrouded in mystery and screened from 
our sight in order that they may not take such 
exclusive hold of our imaginations and our 
thoughts as to unfit us for the work and deprive 
us of the discipline of the present world, at the 
same time provision is made for faith. God has 
been careful to keep faith alive and glowing in 
the hearts of his children. We are not left with- 
out witnesses of eternal things. Positive and 
distinct knowledge would not be good for us, and 
is withholden ; but faith, a certain hopeful, con- 
fiding anticipation of those realities, a seeing of 
them, as it were, through a glass, darkly, — such 
faith elevates, strengthens, consoles, and it is pro- 
vided for in our constitution and in the revela- 
tions and dealings of God. It is in some sense 
innate in man ; that is, the heart feels certain 
natural desires and yearnings and forelookings 
that of themselves kindle into faith. And then 



Oh, that I knew ! 



203 



there is the supporting testimony of the best and 
holiest souls in all time, showing us that the ex- 
pectation of another world, though veiled from 
sight, has been to them a trust, a stay, and a joy. 
And those dear truths relating to things beyond 
the grave are spoken in divine accents from the 
lips of Jesus Christ. Through his inspired and 
inspiring words they breathe themselves softly 
and sweetly into all hearts that listened to Him 
trustfully ; they proclaim themselves more majes- 
tically, more touchingly, from amid the agonies 
of his cross • they bring life and immortality to 
light more distinctly from out of the darkness of 
his forsaken grave ; they shine out from amid the 
clouds that received his ascending form. Yes, 
there is a revelation, glorious, precious, yet not 
too clear, — through a glass, darkly. In healthy 
and well-balanced souls it adjusts itself with dif- 
ferent degrees of distinctness to the soul's wants 
and best interests. It goes by a graduated scale. 
In youth the idea of a spiritual world beyond 
death is not apt to be very vivid. Though the 
mind at that period may be free from skepticism, 
devout in its habits, piously inclined, yet it does 
not turn very intently towards death and a life 
beyond death, and it was never meant to do so. 
Care is taken in the providential plan that it 
should not. The young have the lessons of this 
world to learn, and its work to prepare for, its ex- 
periences to deal with. It is required that their 
sense, thought, feeling, be given to the things of 
the world they are placed in. It would be un- 



204 



Oh, that I knew ! 



natural and unhealthy that they should clearly 
see and realize, and be occupied in contemplat- 
ing the realities of another world. Therefore we 
need not mourn that they seem insensible to 
those things. God would have it so, has made 
them so ; this world first, the next in due time. 
Through a glass, darkly, for awhile. Complain 
not of the glass. God's hand places it there. 

And it is much the same in middle and active 
life. Duty lies here, and the present scene must 
be the only visible one. Faith casts its glances 
beyond the line, but glances only, — no distinct, 
continuous vision. It is not permitted ; it is not 
best. We have seen why. Our eyes must be 
upon our work ; we must be trained to diligence, 
fidelity, and patience, without having our reward 
fully in view, for that would make us selfish in 
our best things, and perhaps distract the mind 
altogether from its duty. We must walk by faith 
and not by sight, —live a man's life worthily in 
this world, whether there be any other world or 
not. It is better to trust and not to know. 

But then, as we go on in life, times and cir- 
cumstances arise that tend to brighten that faith 
into clearer perception. Through a glass, still, 
but not so darkly. We know how it is that to 
a heart which retains its natural reverence and 
piety, in time of sickness and bodily decay the 
idea of another life presses itself home, claims 
more of the thoughts, enlists the feelings, grows 
more real. In times of adversity and disaster, 
such a heart begins to think, amid the wreck of 



Oh, that I knew ! 



205 



things here, what there is hereafter to look for- 
ward to and depend upon. When our dear ones 
are taken from us, one by one, and we are left 
alone, amid the darkness of earth, the stars of im- 
mortality appear, glimmer after glimmer. Through 
the deep solitudes of this weary and stormy life, 
we love to think of the promised reunions of 
heaven ; and anticipation grows vivid, and the 
meaning of Christ's revealing words opens itself 
more and more. 

And then, sometimes, — when death is close at 
hand, and the departing one has nothing more to 
do with this world, or to bear in it, and it will do 
him no harm to have another world opened to 
him, — sometimes it seems as if God then lifted 
the veil entirely, and took away the darkening 
glass, that the soul while yet in the flesh, though 
just leaving it, may catch a view of its inheritance 
close at hand. What mean these visions that 
seem sometimes vouchsafed to the dying. I 
knew a woman the other day, and one little given, 
I should think, to any visions of spiritual fancy 
who in the last hour, when her breath grew faint, 
and her eyes dim to earthly objects, exclaimed, 
as her countenance kindled with an almost celes- 
tial radiance, " Oh, I see the angels ; I am go- 
ing ! " And I knew of another who, in like man- 
ner, when the struggle was just closing, and she 
had given her hand in parting benediction to one 
and another of her dear ones, and her hour had 
come, said, " I see the door open, open wide ; let 
me go in, — farewell;" and she went in. Such 



2C6 



Oh, that I knew / 



beautiful experiences we have related to us from 
thousands of death-beds. We hardly know how 
much they mean. We can build no positive con- 
clusions upon them. For us who remain they 
can only minister to our faith, but give us no 
knowledge. But it does seem as if the good God 
delighted to show Himself and his heaven to his 
children as soon as it would do, willing to dis- 
close the blessed secret even to a fleshly eye in 
those last moments, to brighten up the dark val- 
ley which must be passed through, and give a 
conscious victory over the king of terrors and the 
night of the grave. For it is no harm then, when 
there is no more work to do, nor trial to bear. 
And it gives a gracious, kindly, comforting re- 
newal of faith to those who stand by, — faith, but 
not knowledge ; it is only knowledge to those 
who take it at first hand. Knowledge is not for 
the living, but only for the dying. Not for those 
who are to stay in this world, but for those who 
have left it, or are taking their last step out of it. 

I know not, friends, whether I ought to close 
such' a discourse as this with an exhortation to 
cultivate and seek a more vivid faith in spiritual 
realities, or with an exhortation to be contented 
and patient in working on, and suffering on, with 
such a dim and halting faith as is vouchsafed to 
us. I must do both. Listen reverently to the 
great intimations of the heart as it breathes its 
spiritual hopes in its highest moments, in its high- 
est words of love and confidence. Listen to the 
dear assurances of the Saviour, and take in as 



Oh, that I knew ! 207 



largely as you can that spirit of assured anticipa- 
tion which He carried to his cross and to his 
grave, and up out of his grave. Cultivate a be- 
lieving spirit ; have your conversation in heaven, 
and though you must look through a glass dimly, 
yet look, for there is some light, and it is meant 
for you, to uplift you and comfort you. 

And yet repine not that you can see but darkly, 
— transient, uncertain flashes, and not the broad 
daylight of the heavenly sunshine. Judge not too 
harshly your own doubts or other people's. Do 
not covet that kind of faith which is no faith, but 
sight, which God does not think it good for us to 
have yet. Bear patiently the discipline of uncer- 
tainty. Wait meekly for the uplifting of the veil. 
Keep the heart reverent, pure, dutiful, trustful, 
and God will show himself to you, and the bright- 
ness of his heaven, more and more, little by little, 
as you need it and can bear it. Obey Him and 
ye shall know Him. Trust Him and He will seem 
to come nearer, and He shall make good in due 
time his own promise, "And ye shall seek me 
and find me, when ye shall search for me with 
all your hearts." 

1862. 



XV. 



THE ONE FOUNDATION. 

Other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus 
Christ. — i Cori?ithians hi. 2. 

I DO not know that we can give our thoughts 
a more appropriate direction at this season 
of the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ 
than in considering this declaration of the Apos- 
tle, — how true it was when he made it, how true 
it has been ever since, and how true it is likely 
to continue in the indefinite future. 

His declaration was to the effect that whatever 
theological speculation men might indulge in, 
whatever ritual they might adopt, whatever church 
institutions they might organize, He, Jesus Christ, 
was, and was to continue, the head, the centre, 
the Master, Lord, King, Captain, or whatever 
other title or metaphor He might use to illus- 
trate his supremacy in religion, his spiritual lead- 
ership and authority. Men might build their 
superstructures variously, but there was only one 
foundation for them all. 

It was a bold saying enough when Paul uttered 
it. It had not much visible support. There were 
but few Christians in the world, and they were 
not of much account socially and politically. 



The One Foundation. 209 

The Roman senate, the philosophers of Athens, 
the College of Augury, the priesthood of the old 
religions, would have laughed Paul to scorn had 
he spoken thus in their presence. 

But his words were already coming true, and a 
complete fulfillment of them was hastening on. 
Soon the new religion got possession of the Ro- 
man world, — its throne, its temples, and its peo- 
ple. The mighty fabric, of the Catholic church 
arose. It covered the civilized world. It em- 
braced all Christians in its fold. It was very 
un-Christlike in many of its aspects and doings, 
but it did claim Him for its foundation, — was 
faithful, however erring, in its allegiance to Him. 
Nay, they held in those times, that to go out of 
that church was to go out of the pale of the gos- 
pel, away from Christ, and become heretic and 
heathen, and that absolute church unity was es- 
sential to Christ's kingdom on earth. To break 
that unity would be to dethrone and reject Him. 

But the centuries rolled on. The old church 
became corrupt and tyrannical. The human mind 
revolted against its oppressions and monstrous 
assumptions. The Protestant Reformation came. 
The Church was split and rent. Large popula- 
tions, "whole kingdoms, went off and founded new 
churches, antagonistic to the old one, new creeds, 
new forms, everything new except the founda- 
tion, — they acknowledged and claimed Christ 
for that, as earnestly, as devotedly as the old one. 
The eternal unity of the religion was gone for- 
ever ; but Jesus Christ was held to as loyally, as 



210 



The One Foundation. 



strenuously as ever, as the head over all. Six- 
teen centuries had passed, and He was still su- 
preme. Three more centuries have passed. A 
great diversity of sects and doctrines has arisen, 
clashing much with one another, but professing, 
and really striving, to build on Him, and be true 
to Him, steadfastly adhering to Him. So much 
is secure. The Man of Nazareth is sure of 
eighteen centuries, at least. So long He has 
been the central figure in history, unapproached 
and almost unchallenged in his spiritual head- 
ship. 

But how is it now, and how is it to be in the 
future ? It seems to many as if the time was 
coming, and already far advanced, when the 
brave assertion of the Apostle, in the text, is to 
be exposed to severer tests than it has ever 
known before. They think they see coming on 
a state of intellectual chaos and spiritual anarchy, 
which threatens to engulf the authority and head- 
ship, if not the very name and memory of Jesus 
Christ, — not only to sweep away the old super- 
structure of religious beliefs and observances, 
but to plow up the foundation itself, and remove 
Christ himself from his place as the head of the 
corner. There is active skepticism abroad, — 
such an all-daring spirit of inquiry, dealing in the 
fiercest manner with things that it used to re- 
spect and let alone. Everything is questioned 
nowadays. The Bible is questioned in all its 
books and chapters, as fearlessly as any other 
book. Its correctness in the statements of his- 



The One Foundation. 



21 1 



torical and scientific fact is questioned. Inspira- 
tion is questioned. The miracles are questioned. 
The speculative doctrines, which Christians have 
held for centuries, and thought they could prove 
from the Bible, are more than questioned. Church 
observances, and the obligations of the Sabbath 
are questioned. Nothing can escape this search- 
ing spirit, and its inexorable movement, — or is 
sacred against its profane intrusion and destruc- 
tive encroachments. 

And if this movement is to go on, as it is going, 
with ever bolder tread and a wider sweep, and 
nothing to check it, what can stand against it ? 
men ask, — What will be left of Christianity? and 
when that is gone what place is left for Jesus 
Christ in the believing and affectionate regards 
of mankind ? The whole Christian system being 
thus undermined and shaken, its authority, its 
records, its evidences, its doctrinal body, and 
its church organization, — the system being dis- 
carded, no place will be left for its founder, who 
will thus be proved to have founded nothing that 
can stand, — He must cease to be the world's 
religious head. Why keep the foundation if we 
tear down everything that has been built on it ? 
Such are the fears of the devout conservatism of 
the age. And there is some ground for those 
fears, it must be owned, and yet more ground for 
confidence and good courage. 

The movement that is complained of will un- 
doubtedly go on. Nothing can stop that. It is 
the intellectual drift of the age, inevitable, irre- 



212 The One Foundation. 



sistible, as yonder ocean tide. A merciless criti- 
cism will continue to sift all historical documents, 
in the Bible as elsewhere, as to their contents and 
their authorship, and no reverent regard for 
things established, things ancient, or things sa- 
cred will hinder it. It will bring, is bringing, and 
claims the right to bring, all religious doctrines 
to the test of reason and the moral sense, and 
will suffer nothing to stand that is irreconcilable 
with these. It will not suffer any act, purpose, 
or plan to be ascribed to God, or have any au- 
thority whatever, if it be at variance with the 
sense of right and the humane sentiments in the 
human soul. The intelligent mind of the age is 
borne along in this direction, in some persons 
consciously and exultingly, in some unconsciously, 
and in some reluctantly and with anxious resist- 
ance, but inevitably for all. We can no more 
effectually resist this general mental drift, or fail 
to share it, than we can the movement of our 
solar system, which the astronomers tell us of, 
towards the constellation Hercules. We are car- 
ried along with it, protest and struggle and hold 
back as we may. 

This movement, I say, will surely go on, and 
must, whatever may be the consequences. But, 
for my part, I do not in the least apprehend that 
those consequences will be disastrous to religion, 
or will tend to dis-crown Jesus Christ as spiritual 
king in the world. There are several reasons for 
this confidence. 

In the first place, if Jesus Christ was what we 



The One Foundation. 213 

take Him for, a true Son of God, endowed, in- 
spired, sent to teach and inspire true religion, 
we must infer that He cannot be displaced or de- 
feated, but must permanently triumph, through 
the omnipotence of God and the truth. We may 
adopt the strong metaphor which Jesus himself 
used: "Whosoever shall fall on this stone shall 
be broken, and on whomsoever it shall fall it will 
grind him to powder." 

In the second place, it is to be observed that 
the leaders in this movement, that is to say, 
nearly all the most eminent thinkers and writers 
in literature, philosophy, and religion, are not 
hostile in spirit to Jesus Christ, — do not wish to 
diminish his influence. They are mostly serious 
and earnest, if not devout men. They are not 
scoffers. They profess the highest appreciation 
of Christ, and regard themselves as promoting 
his true cause, his real and legitimate influence. 
The spirit which actuates them, as a general 
thing, is not hostile to religion, or to Christ as 
its highest representative. 

In the third place, and this is the final and 
most important consideration, there is no tend- 
ency in the rationalizing and freely-inquiring 
movement of this age to undermine Christianity, 
or to supersede Christ's spiritual headship ; on 
the contrary, I believe that it will be found to 
strengthen Christianity by purifying it, and to 
establish Christ more firmly in his spiritual em- 
pire, by showing what his claims .really are, and 
what He actually was in spirit and intent. 



214 The One Fotmdation. 



It is true that since the intelligent mind of the 
world has determined to study out its religion, 
and the grounds of it, and bring it in all its parts 
and adjuncts to the test of reason and conscience, 
many old ideas that have got connected with the 
religion are in imminent danger, and have been 
already rejected by many, and essentially modi- 
fied by greater numbers, and are in general in 
a shattered and fading condition ; but none, I 
think, that are in any degree vital to the real re- 
ligion of Christ. 

For one thing, under this progress of reason, 
the position of the Bible, as a book, is undergo- 
ing great modifications. It used to be held, and 
to some extent it is still held, that the Bible was 
written or dictated, in all its language, all its 
ideas, and in all its statements of fact, by God 
himself, and must therefore be infallibly correct 
in every particular, from the beginning of Gen- 
esis to the end of Revelation. For long ages 
hardly a man arose to question that it was so. 
But at length, human reason waking up and mov- 
ing in all directions, moved in this also, and 
began to ask what ground there was for this view 
of the Bible, and found that there was no ground 
for it at all, — that it was pure assumption. Then 
it said, let us study and sift this book as we do 
any other, — reverently, for it deals with great 
subjects, yet freely, for freedom is the reason's 
birthright. 

And the result of the sifting is, thus far, the 
discovery of some errors of science in some of 



The One Foundation. 215 

the books, some errors in statements of facts, 
some discrepancies of statement, some ideas that 
an advanced philosophy cannot accept, and some 
sentiments not now acceptable to a tender con- 
science and a pure heart. 

All this does not impair the value of the Bible • 
all that is vitally true in it remains perfectly un- 
touched and forever unassailable, and what is 
false in it was never of any value. The old idea, 
of a literal inspiration in the writings being ex- 
ploded, there is no longer the necessity which 
weighed so heavily on former generations, of vin- 
dicating the book of Genesis against the science 
of geology, or of imprisoning a Galileo to estab- 
lish the astronomy of the Book of Judges, or to 
apologize for the Apostles, because they mixed 
some of their native Judaism with the purer truth 
they derived from their Master. 

And then this free examination of the Bible 
has brought out to light great stores of its hid- 
den wisdom and beauty. There is a deeper ap- 
preciation of the wealth and worth of the Bible 
now than there was in the times when men dared 
not touch it or look at it in the light of reason. 
And no free dealing with the Bible has manifested 
any tendency or any power to mar the moral 
image, or dim the spiritual glory of Jesus Christ 
as there represented ; but rather to make that 
image and that glory more visible and more shin- 
ing. The more it has become apparent that the 
Bible is not inspired, in the old sense, the more 
manifest it has become that Jesus Christ was in- 



216 The One Foundation. 



spired, in the most spiritual sense, — inspired to 
discern and feel and know and love and exem- 
plify all things true and good, and heavenly and 
divine. The Bible is a debtor to the reason, and 
has been a gainer from its boldest researches. 

Again, the progress of reason is very damaging 
to the systems of theology that have so long 
usurped the name and semblance of Christ's re- 
ligion. Those old doctrines of the creeds have 
been the puzzle and the terror of mankind for 
ages. But they are losing their hold. They are 
still extant, but those who retain them have to 
qualify and soften them in enlightened commu- 
nities, trying to make them accordant with reason ; 
for even they have to recognize the supremacy of 
reason. It is not enough now to quote some 
texts in support of them, for it is known now 
that just as many texts, and as good, can be 
quoted on the other side, — indeed, that a case 
can be made for or against any doctrine, by a 
careful selection of texts. Besides, texts and 
doctrines alike are held amenable now to good 
sense, right reason, and the sense of equity and 
goodness in the human breast, in the light of 
which all texts must be explained, and all doc- 
trines accepted or rejected. Accordingly the old 
creeds, Athanasian, Arian, and Nicene, confes- 
sions of Augsburg, of Geneva, of Westminster, 
Catholic, Protestant, and Anglican, are losing 
their importance, rejected by many, modified by 
more, fading, dissolving, receding, and destined 
to disappear, first in substance, then in form, and 
lastly in name and profession. 



The One Foundation. 217 

But what is loss to creeds and systems and 
sects is gain to Christ. The reason, conscience, 
and heart find nothing in Him to object to or re- 
nounce, but everything to believe and love and 
cleave to. The theological obscurations, and 
doctrinal impediments, being removed, the mind 
gets nearer to Him, understands Him better. 
He stands out more ctearly to view in the sim- 
plicity and beauty, the power, the truth, and di- 
vinity of his teachings, life, and spirit. 

The liberal, rational spirit of the age tends to 
weaken men's belief in the miraculous facts con- 
nected with Christianity. And this is to many 
minds a most alarming tendency. The tendency 
is not to be denied. It has been going on very 
observably for two or three hundred years. Be- 
fore that, miracles were everywhere accepted, and 
constantly expected as almost a matter of course. 
No more evidence was required to establish them 
than any other facts. The human mind was pre- 
disposed to believe in them. But as science ad- 
vanced, and the laws of nature became more 
known, and their uniformity observed, the mind 
began to reluct at alleged exceptions, and to 
scrutinize the evidence for them, — to reject all 
but the best proved, and even to feel incredulous 
about those. 

The phenomena of magic and witchcraft were 
universally believed in, and were continually 
manifesting themselves, until the eighteenth cent- 
ury. But reason, waking up, questioned them, 
and then discredited them, and after a long bat- 



218 The One Foundation. 



tie, with innumerable hangings and burnings, has 
finally put them all out of the range of human 
belief, and they have ceased. 

The miracles of the Catholic Church, which 
were in full and frequent occurrence, and no- 
where questioned until the Reformation, or later, 
have now ceased to recur. The human mind 
was not in a mood to believe or expect them any 
longer, to hold them credible, whatever the testi- 
mony for them. And they only appear now in 
the most benighted quarters. Intelligent Catho- 
lics even, I believe, pay no heed to them. 

There remained the miraculous narratives of 
the New Testament ; but even these are at length 
called in question. And hence much anxiety and 
alarm on the part of those who have been accus- 
tomed to regard miraculous testimony as essen- 
tial to the acceptance of the Christian religion. 

The alarm, I think, is groundless. For, in the 
first place, the miracles still stand in the gospel 
narratives. They have not been disproved, and 
cannot be. None of the evidence for them has 
been invalidated. And the boldest of critics has 
not yet shown, satisfactorily, nor even plausibly, 
how they may be eliminated from the rest of the 
narrative. And in the second place, if the deni- 
ers did succeed in eliminating them, they would 
not thereby impair the true and everlasting 
grounds of Christian faith. 

If you value the miracles, as such, if you rely 
upon them in any degree as proofs, and see no 
incredibility about them, very well ; there they 



The One Foundation. 



219 



are, — they cannot be taken from you. If, on 
the contrary, you so far share the rationalistic 
spirit of the age that the miracles, as such, are 
to you a stumbling-block, and a hindrance to 
faith, — very well, then reject them, if you see 
any way of doing it satisfactorily to yourself, and 
if not, disregard them ; pass by them, and con- 
cern yourself with only the more spiritual and 
vital parts of the gospel, where its essence lies, 
and which are just the same with or without the 
miracles. Let every mind freely follow its own 
bent in this matter, and fear no damage to relig- 
ion, in itself or in the world. The miracles are 
not the principal evidence of Christianity, how- 
ever real and true they may be. If you believe 
Christ himself, his words of truth, — if He inspire 
you with his own faith and spirit, his assurance 
of immortality, his love of God, and of man, his 
pious trust, his devotion to the right and the 
good, so that you apprehend and revere and love 
Him, and your soul accepts Him as its spiritual 
leader and Lord, — then your faith is complete ; 
miracles, if you accept them, will not help it very 
much ; or if you reluct at them, and ignore them, 
your faith remains unshaken and entire. And if 
you have not such faith confirmed in your own 
soul, miracles, however fully you may believe, 
will not give it to you. 

Unmistakably, it is the tendency of the edu- 
cated mind of our period, not by the force of new 
arguments, but by an inevitable mental drift, to 
reluct more and more incredulously from every- 



220 The One Foundation. 



thing miraculous. And the questioning and con- 
troversy on the subject will have, and has already, 
this one good effect, — to turn men's minds to 
Christ himself, what He was in his character and 
heart, and to those responsive oracles in the soul 
which are the surest, the unanswerable, unim- 
peachable testimony to his truth and lordship. 
Good, pious men believe the miracles, and good, 
pious men disbelieve them, — and will both con- 
tinue pious, and loyal to Christ, however the 
question of miracles may be settled, or whether 
it is ever settled or not. 

The true and unassailable faith is a sympathy 
with the mind and life of Christ, and that is the 
same with or without the miracles. When your 
own inmost soul says of Christ's teachings, " I 
feel and know they must be true," — and of his 
traits, " I feel they are noble, beautiful, and di- 
vine, and I love them," — and of his feelings, 
" All that is best in me feels so too," — that is 
Christian faith, and nothing else is, and doctrines 
and creeds and observances and miracles are but 
a poor substitute for it. 

Such are the various doings and results, actual 
and prospective, of this free-thinking, free-search- 
ing spirit of the times. It is very powerful, and 
perfectly irresistible. It has been plowing a deep 
furrow across the world, and will go on to plow 
it deeper. Fear it not. It will disperse many er- 
rors and superstitions, break up old theologies, 
lay hands on some things that are dear to pious 
hearts, disturb some comfortable mental habits. 



The One Foundation. 221 



But fear not. It cannot shake or dim a single 
truth. It cannot touch Jesus Christ, or a single 
lineament of his spiritual countenance. It will 
tear away the theological and ritual swathings 
and wrappages that have hidden Him from sight, 
and reveal his true personality, more lustrous 
and divine than ever before. There has been a 
deal of doctrinal and ritual rubbish to be cleared 
away before men could see the true Christ in his 
glorious divinity and beautiful simplicity of soul. 
It is in process of being cleared away, thank 
God ! When it shall come to be more fully and 
widely seen that religion consists in love to God 
and man, in justice, kindness, purity, trust, and 
hope, — all unselfish affections and virtuous prin- 
ciples and pious aspirings, — then Christ will be 
appreciated, and receive for the first time the full 
homage that is his due, and be worthily crowned 
on earth ; then his kingdom will have come. And 
the free mental movement of the age, though 
often destructive in its immediate effects, and 
sometimes proud and irreverent in spirit, is un- 
consciously helping to bring it in. 

I think Paul's prophecy in the text holds good 
hitherto, and is likely to hold good for indefinite 
periods "to come. Depend upon it, that founda- 
tion will stand as long as there are souls that 
love truth, and love goodness, and seek to obey, 
and love to trust God, and to do good among 
men, and to keep the heart pure, and the life 
blameless, and in weakness, short-coming, and 
sin to repose in the divine mercy and aspire to 



222 The One Foundation. 



a better and immortal life hereafter; so long 
Christ will have true disciples, who will delight 
to cherish his memory, to hail Him Master, Lord, 
and King. 

And as this, his birthtime celebration returns 
from year to year through the future centuries, in 
a more enlightened world, his name will be more 
truly honored, his religion more deeply believed, 
his person more reverently loved, his empire more 
cordially recognized, and his divinity more clearly 
manifested. 



1865. 



XVI. 



THE OFFENSE OF THE CROSS. 

But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling-block, and 
unto the Greeks foolishness; but unto them which are called, both Jews 
and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God. — i Cor. 
i. 23, 24. 

IN undertaking to establish and spread the 
Christian religion, Paul was obliged to set 
forth as the highest man, the representative and 
model man, the embodiment of truth and the 
type of the highest excellence and beauty, a man 
who had been crucified, a sorrowing and suffer- 
ing man, a disgraced and defeated man. This 
necessity seemed to place the Apostle at a great 
disadvantage. Could mankind accept as their 
divinest man one who had lived and died so ? 
One whose prominent symbol was a cross, ex- 
pressive of all humiliation and misery ; a symbol 
that never could be put out of sight, that would 
forever be associated with his memory ! Such a 
man to be the head and impersonation of the 
world's religion ? 

Paul felt the difficulty, and he states it in the 
text. Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling- 
block, an obstacle to their faith in Him. It of- 
fered to them, as the highest man, the Messiah, 



224 The Offense of the Cross. 

as they would call their highest man, the exact 
opposite of what they thought he should be. In 
order to be accepted as their Messiah, he must 
be splendid, powerful, triumphant ; a mighty de- 
liverer of his people from foreign domination; 
he must be regal, like Solomon ; long-lived, per- 
haps not subject to death at all ; a righteous ruler 
and brilliant conqueror. But here they had pre- 
sented to them just the opposite of all this, — a 
poor, homeless, sorrow-stricken man who had 
died, and died young, and died ignominiously. 
Of course they turned away with horror and dis- 
gust from such a man offered them as the Mes- 
siah. To ask them to acknowledge Him was to 
insult them. 

And the claims of Christ could not be expected 
to fare much better with the Greeks, who were 
the other principal element of society there and 
then. The Greeks represented the highest intel- 
lectual culture in philosophy, letters, and the arts 
of that period. And a man to be accepted by 
them as the foremost man and head of humanity, 
must command their intellectual homage : he 
must be a philosopher above all their philoso- 
phers, outshining in wisdom their Plato and Aris- 
totle, and unfold to them the mysteries of creation, 
the origin of things, the destinies of the world, 
the essence of matter and of mind, the sum of 
all human wisdom. And beyond all this, he 
must be strong and beautiful, a living and mov- 
ing Apollo come down among men, — for the 
Greeks worshiped physical strength and beauty, 



The Offense of the Cross. 225 

and abhorred weakness and deformity, — and 
must excel in the games, and distance all com- 
petitors j he must be an orator above Pericles ; a 
warrior that could scatter Persian hosts like a 
mist ; a poet that could take the crown from 
Homer, from Pindar, and from ^Eschylus. He 
must be serene in dignity as Jove, as indomitable 
as Mars, and as genial as Bacchus, and the dar- 
ling of all the Muses. Nothing would pass with 
the Greeks that did not satisfy the aesthetical 
element. They could readily deify men ; but 
they could give no man the highest place in their 
pantheon unless he were the strongest and most 
beautiful among men, a very child of genius, the 
embodiment of art, the model of all culture ; and 
his life must be beautiful ; he must be prosper- 
ous, happy, joyful ; with all the wisdom of the 
schools in his brain, and all the sunshine of 
Greece in his heart, and all the delights of Olym- 
pus in his life. 

Such a Christ as that, if Paul had had one to 
offer them, they would have accepted and placed 
his statue on the Acropolis, and built temples 
and altars for his worship. But he had only 
Jesus of Nazareth to present to them, an outcast 
Jew," whom even his own miserable race rejected, 
who throughout his sad life had not where to lay 
his head, and died helpless and despised, the 
death of a felon. No wonder it was foolishness 
to them, and they flouted the claim as absurd 
and ridiculous. 

We know with what vigor and warmth Paul 
l S 



226 The Offense of the Cross. 

combated this Jewish and Greek prejudice as to 
what sort of person the coming man, the spiritual 
leader of the world, should be. He insisted upon 
it that he should not be such a conquering hero 
or such a prosperous, happy man as they would 
have him; that he should be a sufferer. He 
never tried to evade or gloss over the ugly fact 
of the cross, but made it prominent, — was al- 
ways bringing it forward, — gloried in it, — was 
not content with preaching Christ in general, but 
Christ crucified in particular, — held Him up as 
an object of revering faith, though He was cruci- 
fied, and all the more because He was crucified. 
He seemed to attach more value to that fact than 
to any other fact of his biography, or any words 
of his mouth. So he joined issue with all the 
prepossessions and demands of the enlightened 
people of his age, and girded himself up to fight 
his great battle through, — of Christ against the 
world. 

Now what shall we say of Paul's position in 
this matter ? Shall we say that he was trying to 
make the best of a bad case, and that, as he 
could not reverse the ugly facts, he determined, 
like an able commander in the field, or a skillful 
lawyer in court, to convert the very difficulties of 
his position into advantages, and make them ap- 
pear to be to be all on his side, and make them 
work in favor of his desperate cause ? Or shall 
we say that he was right, and that it was in per- 
fect good faith that he gloried in the cross, and 
that his was a deeper and truer philosophy than 



The Offense of the Cross. 227 

that which demanded a victorious and happy 
Christ or foremost-man, or God-man. 

Time and history and the religious experience 
of centuries have settled this question so conclu- 
sively in Paul's favor that it is difficult for us to 
put ourselves back to the apostolic age and form 
an independent judgment of the merits of the 
question. 

If we could so put ourselves back, I am not 
sure but that, at first thought, we should side with 
the Jews and Greeks and against Paul. We 
should reluct at the idea that the best and com- 
pletest man, the man of men, the Son of Man, 
fit to be the leader of all men, that He should 
be signally a sufferer, that He should come to be, 
as it were, the Lord of the world, and yet the 
world go all amiss with Him ; that He should 
experience so few of the world's blessings and 
all its woes, and finally be crushed, a very martyr 
to his own truth and goodness. Should we not 
be inclined to say rather that the world shall be 
all tributary to the honor and happiness of the 
foremost and divinest man in it ? That his ca- 
reer should be made to illustrate for all men the 
wisdom, the beauty, and success that attend a life 
of virtue and love ; that all the laws of nature 
and all the providences of God should conspire 
to crown his life with all things lovely and felici- 
tous ; that such a life, in order to show forth the 
attributes of God, and win the admiring homage 
of mankind, should be visibly a beautiful, bright 
flowering out of all the richest juices and finest 



228 The Offense of the Cross. 

tissues of nature, showing us the harmony be- 
tween what is highest in spiritual things and what 
is most perfect in the order of nature; that it 
should be a joyous, serene, triumphant life, and 
without a death, — or, if there must be a death, a 
welcome, a transfigured, and a victorious death ? 
If God meant to send one man into the world to 
be above all other men, the crown and pattern of 
humanity, to show us what God is, and what man 
may be, — to lead the procession of the ages on 
their march through a beautiful world to a glori- 
ous destiny, — should not nature, as it were, be 
his ally and his servant, and heap upon him her 
richest treasures and delights ; deck him out with 
all her jewelry, and wreathe her fairest crowns 
about his brow? Is not that the man, who, as 
the object of our loving faith and homage, would 
be our most accepted head, our Redeemer, our 
religion ? So said the Greeks and Jews, arid so 
perhaps we should say if the question had been 
put to us before it was decided otherwise. 

But we should have been in the wrong, and 
Paul was right. His was a deeper and truer phi- 
losophy of things, not apparent to the world's 
first thought, but to its second thought quite ap- 
parent. We know it now, that he was right, and 
that the life and death of Christ was such as they 
should be for the foremost man, and that God 
was right in appointing such a life and death to 
his best beloved Son. 

There are two styles of a worthy and happy 
life : both desirable, both legitimate, each of them 



The Offense of the Cross. 229 

designed by the Creator to diversify and adorn 
the human lot. One of them I may call the 
Greek, and the other the Christian. The Greek 
idea I have already described. Clothed in beauty 
and full of delights, it requires many fine graces 
and virtues to make it complete. Active intel- 
lect, quick and refined sensibilities, a kindly good- 
nature, a sunny and delicious childhood, hopeful 
and exultant youth, strong and successful man- 
hood, a peaceful and reverend old age, — rejoic- 
ing in the golden twilight of a long, fair day. 
And this style of life requires, for its full devel- 
opment, prosjoerous and pleasant circumstances, 
a smooth path and happy surroundings, genial 
skies and a flowery earth, public favor and home- 
bred delights. There is beauty and there is hap- 
piness in it, and the good God bestows it upon 
some in very full measure, and it would seem to 
please Him that there should be some of it, some 
glimpses, intervals of it, in all men's lives. We 
all desire it, and we love to witness it. It is very 
comely and pleasant to behold in the young, and 
if there be some illusions about it we would not 
be in too much haste to dispel them. This is the 
Greek idea of a happy life, favored by the gods. 

The Christian ideal is very different, — not in- 
compatible with this, not excluding and denounc- 
ing this, but in another style, on another level, 
and requiring different circumstances. It is a 
life in which the grander attributes of the soul 
are brought out into predominance. Patience 
and fortitude immovable, courage and energy in- 



230 The Offense of the Cross. 

domitable, rectitude that no power could shake, 
love culminating into disinterestedness and self- 
sacrifice, a soul mightier than the world, and tri- 
umphing over accidents of time and the terrors 
of death, reposing in the love of God and build- 
ing its hopes on the eternal rock. Not happiness, 
but nobleness is the consummation of it. Not 
the beauty of the world, but the beauty of holi- 
ness is its supreme delight. 

This is the Christian style, the Christian idea 
of what is highest. And this style requires for 
its fullest growth and perfect nurture, hardship 
and toil, peril, pain, and grief. It flourishes best 
amid the severities of life and the chastenings of 
God's love. And it is itself, in its own nobleness, 
a compensation for all the earthly joys that it 
misses, all the trials it endures, all the losses and 
crosses it has to bear. It measures life, not by 
the number of its visible blessings, nor by the 
number of its years, but by its inward riches and 
its deeds of duty and love. This is the highest 
and the fairest style. 

We need only look around us, and perhaps 
close at home, to see that some human lives are 
essentially tragedies, and that there are tragic 
elements and periods in all lives. Pain, dark- 
ness, and often premature death, tears and blood, 
are a part of the human heritage. And if ever 
we find ourselves wondering why it should be so 
appointed, or so permitted, let us look to the 
cross and think what it signifies, and learn that 
it is out of such experiences that the loftiest 



The Offense of the Cross. 231 

grandeurs and supremest beauty of the soul do 
proceed, and in them find their incentive, their 
opportunity and their test ; and that without 
them all human life would be shallow and feeble, 
and man be but just one of the animal races, a 
little superior to his brethren in the field, yet on 
the same spiritual plane, and with the same des- 
tiny in prospect. The nobler traits and diviner 
affections by which men rank as the children of 
God, and become clothed upon with immortality, 
must needs have their birth and nurture in tragic 
experiences, and must pass through the fiery fur- 
nace of bitter sacrifice and deathly woe. 

If ever we, too, are left to look upon the cross 
and all that it symbolizes as a stumbling-block 
and foolishness, and to think how much more fit 
and attractive it would have been if our Leader 
and embodied religion had been made one of the 
bright children of the morning, and his life made 
all, beautiful through this world's felicities and 
charms, let us remember that this world's pros- 
perity and beauty and joy, though they are God's 
gifts, — though they are meant for men, and may 
be sought and welcomed and gratefully enjoyed, 
are not the highest things, not our Maker's chief 
benefactions, — are not a religion nor the basis of 
a religion, — are of the world, worldly ; good, but 
not best • beautiful, but not the most beautiful ; 
not a religion ; that love and duty and self-renun- 
ciation and superiority to the world, and all the 
vows and aspirations of an unselfish and uplook- 
ing nobleness, — that these are highest and best, 



232 The Offense of the Cross. 

that these are religion, that the Leader and Christ 
must shine preeminently in these, and that these 
can flourish and blossom and ripen only under 
the shadow of a cross, and that therefore the 
cross is not an offense or a foolishness, but a ne- 
cessity and a boon, the one true symbol of God's 
best love and man's highest hope and destiny. 

The Apostle says that it is to them that are 
called that the cross, or Christ crucified, is the 
power of God and the wisdom of God. Them 
that are called, — that is, those that by any means 
are brought to see that there is something bet- 
ter than prosperity, and nobler than success, and 
fairer than a beautiful earthly lot, and sweeter 
than the pleasures of life, — they are the called. 
And whenever in the religious hour and in the 
loftier mood of the mind, when we are conscious 
of the mightier forces that are in us, of the more 
secret tendencies of our nature, of the sublime 
possibilities of our life ; when we aspire, not 
merely to enjoy, but to love and to do and to be 
the best things, then we are called, and in such 
moments of glorious awakening and heavenly rev- 
elations we shall need no apostle to tell us that 
the cross, the symbol as it is of all the tragedies 
and pains and griefs of the world, is the most 
shining expression of the heavenly Father's love ; 
the type of the soul's splendid opportunities, the 
pledge of a world beyond this world, a joy above 
earthly joy, and the most signal display of the 
wisdom of God and the power of God in his chil- 
dren's behalf. 



The Offense of the Cross. 233 

Assuredly Paul was right to glory in a crucified 
Christ. And depend upon it, whatever cross has 
been bravely taken up and faithfully borne, — 
whether by Christ on Calvary, or any man any- 
where, — ample compensation has been made for 
all its weight and torture by the good God who 
has appointed it to be borne. 

War and famine, pestilence and poverty, all 
the pains and defeats of the great life-struggle, 
all public calamities and private heart-breaks, 
all the acts and scenes of the great world-tragedy, 
whether as concentrated here and there in a sin- 
gle life, or as interspersed at intervals in all lives, 
all are compensated, a thousand times over, in 
the sight of God, by the fruits of nobleness and 
spiritual beauty that spring from that bitter sow- 
ing, and by the light of heaven that breaks out 
of that thick darkness. 

1867. 



XVII. 



SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY, 
My soul thirsteth for God : for the living God. — Psalm xlii. 2. 

THIRST is the metaphor to express an in- 
tense sense of need, the strongest possible 
desire. The need and desire of God is here re- 
ferred to. David, who always felt it, felt it with 
special intensity at the moment of composing 
this Psalm, because he was in special trouble, 
weakness, and grief at the time. And all men of 
a living and thoughtful mind have in all times 
felt that desire and need, — sometimes felt it as 
an insatiable personal necessity of their souls, 
and sometimes only as an intellectual curiosity to 
know all that could be known of that power which 
lies back of nature and of the human soul ; to 
know whether anything can be known about it, 
and if nothing, to know that fact. That there is 
such a power, very few, if any, able and influen- 
tial thinkers have denied or do deny. Atheism 
has but a slight hold of the intellect of the world. 
I will leave that out of view for the present. 

But what kind of a being is this supreme Power, 
or God ? What his character and attributes ? 



Science and Theology. 235 

Men want to know this. And the answer varies 
according to the point of view from which the 
question is approached. 

Viewed from the side of the material universe 
and the laws of nature, you get one answer; 
viewed from the human and spiritual side, man's 
moral and affectional nature, another and differ- 
ent answer is obtained ; viewed from both sides 
comprehensively, you get still another — a third 
kind of answer. 

Now the philosophical historians teach us that 
one or the other of these two modes of approach- 
ing the question prevails at any given epoch, then 
there comes a change and the other mode pre- 
vails. 

At present, as you well know, the material side 
is uppermost. God is viewed from the side of 
the material universe ; that is, the most eminent 
and influential minds of the time, partly follow- 
ing and partly directing the mental drift of the 
age, are devoted to the advancement of physical 
science, and quite naturally are led to apply their 
habitual or physico-scientific methods of investi- 
gation to all subjects, and to theology amongst 
others. 

The men who preeminently are the leaders and 
representatives of thought in the English-speak- 
ing world at present are such men as Spencer, 
Darwin, Tyndall, and Huxley, — not that they 
are read or listened to by the masses of people, 
but their influence and way of thinking pervades 
the intellectual atmosphere, and runs down, 



236 Science and Theology. 

through whatever filtration, into the general 
mind around and below them. 

Now these, I believe, are all as good as they 
are great, true and honest men, loving the truth, 
and pursuing it with a single eye and aim, desir- 
ing only the best welfare of mankind. 

What do these men, and such as they, find God 
to be, approached from their physico-scientific 
point of view. I must speak very generally, for 
they doubtless differ from one another in some 
respects ; and no one has a right to speak for 
them. But, in general terms, I think it safe to 
say of them, that they find it reasonable, perhaps 
necessary, to suppose that there is an infinite 
Power veiled behind this material universe, which 
may be reverently called God, and to this Be- 
ing or Power they ascribe intelligence, — though 
without consciousness, and therefore hardly in- 
telligence in our sense of the word, without per- 
sonality, in our sense of it, without volition or 
choice, without affection. He or it is force, or 
the sum and centre of all these forces that play 
around us. He is law, the sum or embodiment 
of all these natural laws which we witness in nat- 
ure. He is the principle of the order and har- 
mony which we see in the universe. The fit 
worship of Him or it consists in the admiring awe 
and delight with which we contemplate the glori- 
ous and beautiful order of things, and we have 
no personal relations with Him or it, except to 
study and obey the laws of nature which we find 
in force around. 



Science and Theology. 237 

Such or such like is the God of physical sci- 
ence. The scientific intellect, as such, and as 
embodied in such men as I have named, finds no 
other ; requires no other ; and, as for desire, the 
scientific intellect, as such, by its very nature, has 
no desires, or only the desire of truth. Such is 
the theology that the most influential minds of 
the time substantially hold, and are diffusing 
abroad, and to which the intellect of the time is 
more or less consciously tending, — the theology 
which is shaped or led up to by a scientific habit 
of mind predominating, carrying all before it for 
the moment. It has not been always so, and it 
will not be always so ; but by the law of alterna- 
tions it is so just now. 

There have been periods when the leading in- 
tellects were most interested in the human side 
of the universe, the spiritual side, rather than the 
physical, and deduced the attributes of God from 
the inner forces of the soul rather than from the 
forces of nature or in addition to them, — that is, 
applied the methods of spiritual science, rather 
than of physical science, to their theological in- 
quiries, and so found a God who was not only 
law, force, and a quasi intelligence, which was all 
outward nature proved Him to be, but was also a 
conscious personality, a righteous, loving, and 
holy being, which the laws and endowments of 
the human soul prove Him to be, just as certainly 
and by as legitimate a method of proof. 

Such a period was that just preceding the pres- 
ent. Through the first half of the present cent- 



238 Science and Theology. 

ury, the most influential thinking was from this 
spiritual stand-point more concerned with the 
spiritual laws than the physical laws, and claim- 
ing for them at least an equal authority in dis- 
closing the nature of Deity. In that period there 
were mighty preachers, such as Robert Hall and 
Chalmers in England, and Channing in America, 
who were listened to by the cultivated intellect 
of the English-speaking world as no preaching is 
listened to just now, partly from their great abil- 
ity, and partly from their representing the intel- 
lectual tendency of the time. 

The poetry of Wordsworth and his school had 
a most powerful influence in diffusing the spirit- 
ual view of things. Scott, the great novelist of 
the first portion of the half-century, wrote no the- 
ology, but the intense and pure human interest 
of his tales set his influence on the spiritual side, 
and his biography confirmed it by showing his 
deep personal conviction and feelings in the same 
direction. DicTkens, who occupied the latter por- 
tion of the period, from the intensity of personal 
tenderness and human sympathy which he awak- 
ened in millions of his generation, exerted indi- 
rectly a powerful preparatory influence on the 
spiritual side. Coleridge was, by universal con- 
sent, the profoundest thinker of that period. 
He did more than all others to turn the tide of 
thought from the material and prudential dead- 
ness of the preceding century in the direction of 
spiritual life, — regenerating the mind of young 
England and America. He did not address the 



Science and Theology. 239 

masses, except mediately, by teaching and in- 
spiring the teachers and directing the genius of 
his time. The earlier writings of Carlyle were 
powerful auxiliaries on the spiritual and human 
side. 

Looking back through, the ages, we find at in- 
tervals such periods and such groups of powerful 
thinkers, who set a spiritual stamp upon those 
periods, and both turned and followed the bias 
of the general mind to the human and spiritual 
view, in contrast and in alternation with that of 
material interests and physical science. We might 
go back in this review of alternations even to the 
Psalmist, the first great spiritualist, whose influ- 
ence has never ceased. His devotional pieces, 
inspired by the spiritual theology, have been dear 
to myriads of responsive souls unto this day. 

But the chief representative, in all time, of this 
spiritual view of the Deity, was Jesus Christ. 
His was the most largely, most intensely human 
soul that ever wore flesh. Accordingly He knew 
his own soul, and through that knew all souls 
better than any other has known them. And it 
was through this knowledge that He knew God. 
As the men of physical science know what God 
is as to some of his attributes, from the con- 
templation of the laws of forces working in the 
material part of creation, so He knew other 
attributes of God, from being profoundly con- 
versant with the laws and forces working in the 
other part of creation, i. e. the souls of men. 
He reasoned from one class of facts as legiti- 



240 Science and Theology. 

mately and to as sure a conclusion as the men 
of science do from another class of facts. He 
would not deny their conclusions, and they are 
not competent to deny his. It requires both 
conclusions combined to make up the full and 
comprehensive idea of God. From his point of 
view, his field of experience and contemplation, 
Christ saw and knew that God was not only 
power, but beneficent power; not only intelligence, 
but conscious intelligence ; not only physical law, 
but moral law also ; not only physical force work- 
ing in matter, but a spiritual force, working in 
souls ; not only a presence, but a person ; not only 
the organizer of the outward worlds, but the fa- 
ther of souls, having as intimate relations with 
his spiritual offspring as with his material crea- 
tion, — a being possessing the attributes which He 
has endowed our souls with, only without the im- 
perfections and limitations, — infinitely transcend- 
ing them. Such was Christ's God, — a righteous, 
merciful, loving God, — a God to be loved and 
trusted and leaned upon and obeyed and prayed 
to, to fly to for refuge, to turn to for light and 
comfort, for the law of life and for hope in death. 

As the mathematician, Leverrier, so great in 
his sphere of knowledge, from observing some 
facts in the material heavens knew that the planet 
Neptune existed out there in the farther spaces 
of our system, knew it, knew its dimensions, its 
distance, its orbit, before it was seen as well as 
after, so Jesus, from observing the facts and 
needs of the human soul, knew that the infinite 



Science and Theology. 241 

Father, the wise and loving One, exists up in the 
spiritual heavens, a sure and necessary reality 
that must be there and needs not to be identified 
by the fleshly sight. 

This is the God that the physical science of 
our day, as represented by its leading men, does 
not find nor recognize. They find only power 
and an intelligent tendency operating in the uni- 
verse ; they do not find the Christian God ; in 
all honesty, they fail to find Him. Well, of 
course they do not and cannot find Him at the 
end of their line of thought. They deal only 
with material phenomena, physical facts and ap- 
pearances, and the forces revealed in them. And 
these cannot reveal Christ's God. They cannot 
find Him, of course, at the bottom of their cru- 
cibles, nor at the end of their telescopes, nor in 
the field of their microscopes, nor between their 
rocky strata, nor in the analysis of brains and 
blood. Christ did not find Him there. He is 
not there. It is not their province to deal with 
the greater facts of the soul ; or if they do, 
they naturally but vainly and presumptuously 
try to class them, through their passion for gen- 
eralization and unity, in the same order with their 
material facts. It is natural that they should 
be unwilling to recognize a class of facts and 
laws outside of their line of thought, so they 
propound the idea that the human soul itself is 
nothing but the last and finest efflorescence of 
matter, — matter at first inorganic dust, then 
passing into life in its lowest forms, and thence 
16 



242 Science and Theology. 

up through slow and numerous stages till it cul- 
minates in soul, — the soul of a Newton, a Shake- 
speare, a Plato, a Christ ; the soul with its holiest 
and sweetest affections, its imperial will, its sacred 
conscience, its large discourse of reason, looking 
before and after, its heaven-scaling imagination, 
its heroism of duty and of love and of sacrifice, 
its hopes aspiring to immortality, all this and 
these growing out of the dull clod by chemical 
laws, without a loving God, a conscious God, a 
righteous God, to foresee it, to bring it forth, to 
endow and inspire it ! Such is the poor conclu- 
sion that physical science, when transcending its 
rightful province, leads to. 

As for the human body, let the men of physical 
science deal with that as they will ; that is mat- 
ter, and subject to the laws of matter; that is 
within their province. Let them establish their 
latest hypothesis, that it comes from an ape, from 
a fish, from a shapeless jelly. Let them estab- 
lish that ; if it be the truth we will welcome it. 
All truth is good. God-speed all the seekers of 
it ! We need have no fears of the development 
theory in the realm of matter. But as to the 
soul, this theory can never be anything but an 
hypothesis ; can never be established. And is it 
an hypothesis that it is philosophical to enter- 
tain? Is it sound philosophy or good sense to 
seek the origin of soul in a source beneath itself, 
rather than above it ? Does dead matter impart 
that which it has not, and which it does not know 
of ? If there is a soul inman, is there not a 



Science and Theology. 243 

greater soul above it, from which it came, and 
whose image it faintly bears ? If man loves and 
thinks and wills, is there not a God that loves and 
thinks and wills, and has enabled him to do so ? 

But I discuss this matter at a disadvantage, for 
I am not scientific. When the great oracles of 
physical science speak and declare this or that 
to be a fact or law or principle, the world listens 
with deference, as if the matter were settled and 
there could be no appeal. And so it is settled, 
and ought to be accepted, if the matter be fairly 
within the province of physical science. When 
all the masters of physical science agree that the 
matter is within their province, and agree in the 
doctrines about it, I know not who can take an 
appeal, or who should wish to. 

And as to the matter of the being and attri- 
butes of the Deity, several living adepts in physi- 
cal science, as such, do not find or need such a 
God as the Psalmist worshiped and Jesus found 
and declared, or revealed, therefore they cannot 
recognize such a God, and more than doubt the 
existence of such an one, and many listen to 
them as if their dictum of science must be the 
final word on the subject. And now shall we 
not be swift to say, Away with the old-fashioned 
notions about a personal, or a conscious and lov- 
ing God, — such notions answered well enough 
for the days of men's ignorance, but now the 
light of science is poured upon them they must 
disappear like the mists of morning before the 
ascending sun ? Away with them ! But stop ! 



244 Science and Theology. 



Stay the verdict a little ! There have been and 
are other adepts in science, as good as any of 
these, who do not acquiesce, who deny the con- 
clusion, who indeed come to the opposite opinion. 
Let me call a great name, — Faraday. Faraday 
was the peer of any one or all these living men, 
their peer in their own realm ; he just preceded 
them in time, — he has been dead but four years ; 
he was their teacher and master. Any one of 
them will be fortunate if he shall be found at the 
close of life to have added so much to the sum 
of human knowledge, or acquired so great and 
lasting renown. He led the way into those realms 
of thought in which they have advanced so far ; 
he foreshadowed and prophesied and partly real- 
ized their grandest generalizations. In science 
he was king so lately, and these men his worthy 
successors, and only that. And Faraday earnestly 
held, and solemnly declared, that in the actual 
discoveries or legitimate conclusions of physical 
science there is nothing that in the least invali- 
dated the simple beliefs and pieties of the Chris- 
tian faith ; that physical science could not go a jot 
beyond the facts and forces and laws of the ma- 
terial world, and must leave the spiritual realm 
untouched. The warm and beautiful piety of his 
childhood he kept through life, lived by it, and 
died by it, and found nothing in science to shake 
its foundations or dim its brightness. He used 
to pass from his scientific throne in the Royal 
Institution, where he nightly instructed and de- 
lighted the intellectual elite of the English-speak- 



Science and Theology, 245 

ing world, to the desk of a little chapel of an 
obscure sect in one of the by-ways of London, 
where with prayers and homilies he led the serv- 
ices of a small and humble assembly of fellow- 
believers, — pass, I say, from one to the other, 
and feel no incongruity or inconsistency, loving 
the truth that is in Christ as sincerely as the truth 
that is in nature and science. His keen and 
searching intellect gave him a knowledge of nat- 
ure, and the God of nature ; his pure and even 
childlike heart, his affections and instincts, his 
conscience and his needs, and his spiritual dia- 
lectics, gave him the God of the soul, the heavenly 
Father, and the two faiths blended harmoniously 
and naturally into one in Him, and needed no 
reconciling, for they felt no contradiction. 

Now, if the men of science are to be listened 
to with special deference on questions of the- 
ology, which is most worthy of our ear, Faraday 
or one of his successors ? I should say the for- 
mer. His theology is the larger generalization, 
embracing not only all that external nature can 
teach or intimate, but also all that human nature, 
in its most interior, depths, can disclose to him- 
self and to such a spiritual eye as that of Jesus 
Christ. His was the more comprehensive mind, 
looking both outwards and inwards, seeing two 
worlds, while they seem to see but one. The the- 
ology of physical science alone is one-sided, nar- 
row and cold, a mere ganglion of forces, a code 
of physical laws. Add to it the theology of a 
living conscience and a loving soul, and a tender, 



246 Science and Theology. 

trusting heart, and you enthrone over the uni- 
verse, and over your own being, the living God, 
the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. 

Each age is apt to regard itself as a finality in 
the world's progress, as if the abiding wisdom had 
been achieved at last. And there are those, not 
a few, here and everywhere, who imagine that 
this physical science which just now dominates 
the minds of men is the last word of wisdom ; 
that henceforth all great intellects and the high- 
est genius will be devoted to physical science as 
the only thing worth knowing, and the only source 
of knowledge and ground of faith, and accord- 
ingly that the old religious philosophy of the 
gospel and of the human heart is gradually but 
surely fading out, is hopelessly moribund, and 
can never be revived and reinstated. But fear 
not this result, ye who deprecate it ; hope it not, 
ye who desire it. This age of material inquiry 
and progress will be succeeded by an age of 
spiritual activity, just as it was preceded by such 
an one, and just as the two have been alternat- 
ing through all time, according to that irrepeal- 
able tidal law which operates in all human affairs, 
the law of alternations, of action and reaction. 
It seems as if human progress had to be made 
one side at a time. The spiritual side sometimes 
absorbs the intellectual forces of the world, and 
moves on at a great pace, and then that force 
goes over to the material side, which had got far 
behind, and fetches that up, and carries it ahead 
to a certain bound, and then changes again. 



Science and Theology. 247 

Just now, as I have said, physical science ab- 
sorbs the best intellect and commands the world. 
It is right that it should, — right and needful, — 
now is its turn. I rejoice in its progress. I bid 
it God-speed. I honor and admire the men who 
are so grandly carrying it forward ; it is their 
mission, and nobly do* they fulfill it. It is their 
day, and nobly do they improve it. But they 
have their limitations ; they cannot span the whole 
field of human interests, they cannot grasp and 
hold up all truth. And by all the analogies of 
history, and all the needs of the world, we may 
be sure that the next group of great men that 
shall come upon the stage will be men who will 
carry their power and genius into the science of 
the soul, will reexplore the human, the spiritual 
world, carry forward that side of progress, and 
revive the truths that their predecessors are omit- 
ting or losing. The next age will be a spiritual 
one, and will use and not be used by that physi- 
cal science which now has all things its own way. 

But that spiritual epoch will not arrive in sea- 
son for us, except it be the youngest of us. We 
must finish our career under the present regime. 
Therefore we must take care to keep our balance, 
— resist the drift so far as it is partial and one- 
sided, — take its splendid benefits, but not sur- 
render our whole souls to it ; not let it, while it 
illumines and enriches us on one side of our 
nature, impoverish and starve us on the other 
side. 

And now this closing word of counsel. 



248 Science and Theology. 

If there is in you any of the old faith in the 
God of the Gospel, the God and Father, whom 
Jesus found and knew and prayed to, oh, keep 
it, and cherish it, and strengthen it. Put away, 
if you can, and let the disclosures of science help 
you to put away from you, what has been super- 
stitious and narrow and grossly anthropomorphic 
in that faith • but the faith itself, in its essence, 
keep and hold fast, as a most precious posses- 
sion. It is the largest philosophy, it is the wid- 
est generalization. Depend upon it, no science 
can deal a legitimate blow against it, or bring a 
valid reason against it. There are no greater 
intellects than those that have maintained it. 
Out of the bosom of it have come the noblest 
heroisms, the most Christlike sacrifices, the best 
strength and sweetness of our nature. It is the 
loving and confiding faith, it is the bond of hu- 
man brotherhood, it is the pledge of immortality, 
it is sweet peace in believing. In your strong, 
bright hours of health and prosperity you may 
imagine you can do without it ; but in the dark 
hours, in weakness and in grief, in loneliness, in 
sickness and death, it ministers to a great need, — 
supporting, consoling, luminous. It is a faith 
that is as wise as it is happy, as strong in its 
roots of reason as it is beautiful in its blossom- 
ings of feeling. The prayer it inspires is meat 
and drink to the soul. Happy is he, and as wise 
as happy, whose heart panteth, thirsteth for God, 
for the living God. 
187 1, 



XVIII. 



HATH GOD SAID IT? 



And he said unto the woman : Yea, hath God said, ye shall not eat 
of every tree of the garden? — Genesis iii. 3. 




HIS was the question put by the serpent to 
Eve, in the Garden of Eden. 



This curious account of the first transgression 
of the divine law by man is, of course, allegori- 
cal. As Coleridge says : " No unprejudiced man 
can pretend to doubt that if in any other work 
of Eastern origin he met with trees of life and 
knowledge, or talking snakes, he would want no 
other proofs that it was an allegory he was read- 
ing." It was the Oriental method, and it has 
been adopted by ^Esop in Greece, La Fontaine in 
France, and by many another moralist in every 
age and country, down to the last volume of 
Froude. It has been found a popular and effect- 
ive way of teaching moral and philosophical 
truth. 

This Bible account of transgression and fall in 
Eden is none the less true for being an allegory. 
It is as true, to all moral intents, as if it related 
actual facts. We do not know much as to the 
actual facts about the fall of the first man and 



250 



Hath God said it ? 



woman ; but we know a good deal about the fall 
of men and women nowadays, including our 
own, — and we know that the way of it is pretty 
accurately represented under that allegoric, veil. 
It cannot be true that " in Adam's fall we sinned 
all," but it is true that other men fall in about 
the same way, and I suppose that the narrative 
of his fall, written ages after his day, was a reflex 
or transcript from the common experience of 
men. 

The desire for forbidden things, excited by 
curiosity and appetite, burns in every breast, as 
in that of the first man or woman. There arises 
the doubt as to its being so very bad, then the 
denial, then the deed. That is the natural his- 
tory of sin or wrong-doing, whether in Eden or 
in Boston. The same forbidden fruit grows be- 
side all waters, and tempts, and is plucked and 
eaten alike on the banks of the Euphrates and of 
the Charles. 

Any person endowed with the ordinary mental 
and moral faculties and breathing a healthy moral 
atmosphere in childhood, very early makes the 
fundamental moral distinction between things 
right and things wrong, between things permit- 
ted or obligatory and things forbidden. Whether 
the moral feeling that makes this distinction is 
innate or acquired, whether an intuition or an 
induction, whether derived from or preceding the 
experience of the useful, is an old and forever 
open question which we need not decide. Noth- 
ing vital is ever found to depend on these open 



Hath God said it? 251 

questions of speculative philosophy. This faculty 
or feeling, however originating, is there early in 
the healthy mind. It is at once a perception and 
a sense of obligation. Its word is, " This thing is 
right, do it ; that thing is wrong, do it not." Do 
the right and thou shall live, or it shall go well 
with thee ; the wrong and thou shalt die, or it 
shall go ill with thee, — the words life and death 
being an ancient expression for the rewards and 
penalties in general, however various in form and 
degree. 

And this moral sentiment or perception couples 
itself in each person's mind with that person's 
highest religious idea, however that idea may 
shape itself in his mind. God hath said it, he 
feels, whether He said it as so many have be- 
lieved, in literal words, in some far-off, primitive 
Eden, or disclosed it in vision to the patriarchs, 
or bade Moses write it on the stone tables, or 
breathed it by the mouth of inspired prophets, 
or by the teaching of his anointed Christ, or 
whether that word speaks itself in the instincts 
of each soul, in the law of man's being and the 
constitution of the universe. God hath said it, 
— the highest, — whether that highest be law or 
lawgiver ; whether it be the course of nature or 
one who devises and directs it, — either way, the 
supreme authority, the personal or impersonal 
veracity of things and arbiter of destinies. 

Thus the case stands, with each soul of man 
in more or less distinct consciousness, or thus it 
has, at some time or other, stood with it. A 



252 



Hath God said it? 



sense of right and wrong, with God, the highest, 
back of it, and a clear or a vague sense of mighty 
consequences depending on obedience, — as it 
were, a question of life and death. What more 
can be wanting to keep the soul loyal ? 

But then there comes, — such is the moral 
scheme of the moral universe, — there comes a 
test and a trial. The desire for some forbidden 
thing, or for a forbidden neglect, gets awakened, 
outward things kindle and stimulate it. It grows 
strong and stronger. It takes possession. It 
enlists the imagination, which exaggerates the 
profit or the pleasure. It becomes passion. It 
raises in the soul a mist, a flame, a smoke, a 
whirl, that blinds the inner eye, confuses the 
moral ideas, distorts the right proportion of 
things. The surest things of the spirit begin to 
look dubious. The old foundations of moral 
faith shake and totter, as to the eye and brain of 
a drunken man. Fatal questions arise. Is there, 
after all, such a real and sharp line between right 
and wrong? Is it so very bad and dangerous, 
this thing called wrong ? Perhaps it is only an 
illusion, the relic of an effete superstition, a 
dream of foolish childhood, an old-world fable. 
The bewildered soul doubts, and it is as if the 
wily devil of the old legends laughed at the silly 
scruples. It is as if the serpent hissed in the 
willing ear, the old cavil, the deadly doubt, " Hath 
God said it ? " Encouraged by the doubt, the 
disobedient desire seizes the moment, and blazes 
and presses anew, and the doubt grows affirm a- 



Hath God said it ? 



253 



tive and stiffens into denial, and the next serpent 
hiss is, " No, God hath not said it. Thou shalt 
not surely die ; it is not so serious a matter ; no 
great evil will come of it," — and then the Rubi- 
con is passed, the luscious apple is plucked and 
eaten. And such is the fall of man in all times, 
with or without the Bible record of the first in- 
stance of it, and just as truly without as with it. 

I suppose that any one who could recall his first 
transgression, or first great one, or any leading 
one, would be conscious of some such reasoning 
within himself at the time, either patent or latent, 
explicit or implicit, and that if he be capable of 
a fine moral analysis, he would recall a certain re- 
vulsion of feeling at the moment when he took 
the bad leap, as if something in him protested 
and revolted, and would draw back at the last 
moment, and tried to cry out, out from his abused 
and dumb heart, " but God hath said it after all," 
and that he did the deed with a certain trem- 
bling of the will, and a certain shiver of appre- 
hension, as if God were in earnest in the prohi- 
bition, and something dreadful might happen to 
him, — as though the experiences of Dathan and 
Abiram, and Ananias and Sapphira, though but 
mythic legends, might come frightfully true on 
the spot. But then his guilty apple is luscious to 
his appetite. It does not choke or poison him, 
— nothing happens. There is no catastrophe ; 
the earth does not open to swallow him, no thun- 
derbolt out of heaven strikes him, the detectives 
are not on his track, his fellow-men do not frown 



254 



Hath God said it f 



upon him nor shun him, as if they saw the mark 
of Cain on his forehead. He does not hear the 
voice of the Lord God, walking in the garden in 
the cool of the day. Things seem to go on just 
as before, with the world and with him. He still 
lives and prospers. So, after all, God hath not 
said it, or did not really mean it, and does not 
care about it — takes no notice of it. It is all one 
with the righteous and the wicked, so-called in 
the old Bible cant. And there are more bright 
apples on the tree of life, and new crops of them 
to come. Let us take our fill of them. 

That is the real atheism. Not the grave, truth- 
seeking, law-searching, law-revering speculations 
of a Darwin or a Mill, but the loss of the sense 
of moral distinctions. He who loses that, giving 
ear to the serpent hiss, though on his knees he 
wear away the altar stones in worship of the God 
of the creeds, is truly without God in the world, 
or his God is but an empty name, a fetisch, an 
emotional phantasm. 

Of course I do not mean to say that every 
transgression or wrong act is the conscious re- 
sult of the elaborate process of reasoning I have 
described, or necessarily involves the final or total 
loss of the moral sense, or the triumph of abso- 
lute atheism. I speak of tendencies, and of the 
origin and growth of moral skepticism, and of the 
principles, or rather the denials, that underlie the 
fall of man and of men. 

In all transgressions and tamperings with evil, 
it turns out in the end that God hath said it. 



Hath God said it? 255 

The divine law vindicates itself in human experi- 
ence. The decree, thou shalt surely die, is real- 
ized, not in the letter of it, but in the spirit of 
it. Slowly, it may be, by subtle processes, by 
gradual advances and in unexpected ways ; but 
somehow or other the sentence gets executed. 

This result takes place most obviously and 
speedily in those cases in which human law can 
and does cooperate with and re-affirm the divine, 
and the sin is declared a crime, and the sword of 
human justice becomes the symbol of that invisi- 
ble sword of the cherubim which we read of, 
placed at the east of the Garden of Eden, — the 
flaming sword which turned every way, to keep 
the way of the tree of life. 

Very affecting to me are the brief newspaper 
records of trial scenes that take place in our 
courts, with such alarming frequency of late 
years, — trials for one or other form of fraud or 
defalcation. I do not happen to have known any 
one of these criminals, and I have not entered a 
criminal court these twenty years. But some- 
times I try to imagine the scene. There, in the 
prisoner's dock, — the place of infamy, in which 
have sat from day to day, from year to year, a 
long" succession of thieves and forgers, and burg- 
lars and adulterers, — there sits now, on that 
horrid seat, a man perhaps quite young, or in 
the prime of middle manhood ; a man who but 
lately held a place of large and honorable trust ; 
the intimate of honorable men and beautiful and 
virtuous women, respected by his neighbors, per- 



256 



Hath God said it ? 



haps worshiped in his pleasant home, and never 
dreaming that he should become unworthy of his 
position, or lose his self-respect ; and now there 
he is in that seat of shame. I imagine that he 
almost doubts his own identity, or thinks it is a 
horrid dream. I see him pinch himself, to see if 
it is himself, and if he is awake, and the scene is 
real, — and indeed it is real. 

But how came he there ? Some time lately or 
far back, at one large haul or in successive drib- 
lets, he took money or money's worth, that be- 
longed to another, or was confided to him in 
sacred trust. He needed it. Not till after a 
sharp fight with his higher nature could he take 
it. But the exigency was pressing; some expen- 
sive and passionate taste or appetite demanding 
gratification, or a certain style of living to be 
maintained, or some old debts to be paid that 
would wait no longer, or a promising opportunity 
of speculation by which to get rich once for all, 
or out of weak good-nature to assist some ex- 
travagant or speculating friend who had got into 
trouble, — no matter what. But how could he 
take it. Hath not God said, " Thou shalt not eat 
of the fruit of that tree?" but then his need was 
so urgent ; and then the serpent whispers within 
him, " Hath God said it ? " Is it so very wrong ? 
The money is but trash, a thing of mere conven- 
tional value, and this particular money will not 
be missed, nobody will go hungry for want of it. 
No, God hath not said it ; and that awful bar- 
rier being broken down, the rest is easy. He 



Hath God said it ? 257 

will replace the money seasonably, or he will hide 
the theft in a maze of figures, and nobody be the 
wiser or the worse, — and the deed is done. 

Then comes the end. Some confederate proves 
weak or treacherous, or the figures cannot be 
made to lie hard enough, or a keener eye than 
he expected reckons up the columns, then the 
exposure, and then that court-house scene. 

The real fall of the man took place when he, 
in thought, parted with honesty, abandoned his 
principles, broke with the eternal justice, and the 
serpent whispered the infernal question, " Hath 
God said it ? " and " Ye shall not surely die," and 
"There is no great harm in it." That was the 
fall. The rest is a mere shuffling of accounts, a 
race with the detectives, a game of hide-and-seek 
with the laws of the land, and he is worsted in 
that unequal game, and there he is in the dock. 

Oh, it must be a very tragic scene there in the 
court-house, — a fair life blighted, the priceless 
jewel of honor and a good name gone, hope 
gone, and the meshes of evidence gathering 
about him, wife or sister or mother or children 
crouching at his side, or waiting in agony in the 
lobby or in the ruined home, — waiting for the 
verdict. And it comes, and the sentence, and 
the prison-van, and the grated cell, and the world 
shut out, — except to memory and remorse. It 
must begin to look to him as if God had said it ; 
he does not die, indeed ; but I think he must some- 
times wish he could, or at least that he had never 
been born. 

17 



258 Hath God said it? 



One more act of the drama must be noted, 
though not always public. The petitions for 
a pardon circulate. Tender-hearted neighbors 
thoughtlessly intercede for the poor convict; sym- 
pathy for him is everywhere awakened. Broken- 
hearted wife, or mother, daughter, sister besiege 
the president or governor, on their knees, day 
and night, with tears and groans, praying for a 
pardon for him. It was a thoughtless act, they 
plead ; he did not mean it ; his heart was always 
right ; he was the best of husbands, fathers, 
neighbors ; and he is so penitent ; and his family 
will starve. Oh, give him back to us, that we 
may live, and that we may smile again, in the 
poor faint way that we can smile again. And the 
poor distracted magistrate cannot bear the sight 
of the tears and the heart-break, and he yields 
so often as almost to defeat the solemn ends of 
justice. I will not reproach him. I should be 
weaker still, I fear, in his place. I have heard 
an old governor of Massachusetts describe the 
heart-rending scenes of this sort that he had 
gone through. It requires nerves of steel to 
withstand such appeals. But the Brutus element 
is wanted in the magistrate. In the present state 
of society, with such frequency of crime and such 
looseness of principle, a sense of the sanctity of 
the eternal laws, and the dread testimony that 
God hath said it and it must stand, is a higher 
duty, a nobler virtue in magistrate or man than 
sweet compassion and tender-heartedness. The 
easy frequency of pardons is only less alarming, 



Hath God said it? 259 

and only less clearly on the soft-voiced serpent's 
. side instead of God's, than the frequency of fraud 
and theft. 

The prohibitory word of God is equally made 
good, and his law vindicated as surely, if not so 
visibly, in cases of sin undiscovered or unpunish- 
able by man, and when human law cannot or 
does not cooperate with the divine. 

Who committed that murder the other day out 
yonder ? Man knows not. It is a secret. But 
there is a man somewhere, who, if still alive, is 
a miserable vagabond on the face of the earth, 
carrying the intolerable burden of his guilty 
secret, trembling perhaps at every foot-fall he 
hears, with no hope of another hour's peace and 
conscious safety on earth, harrowed by remorse 
and fear, dying a thousand deaths in the life- long 
fear of one, his very sleep a terror; as with 
Macbeth, there is for him, " nor flying hence nor 
tarrying here." That man knows that God has 
said, " In the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt 
die " — or worse. 

And in crimes less flagrant, and sins less black 
in men's sight, the primal prohibition still stands 
unrevoked, and the dread threat is still executed 
somehow. Do anything against honor and truth, 
probity and purity, and the penalty in some 
shape is inevitable as death. You will feel it in 
some weakening of the faculties, or some waste 
of intellect, or some pangs of physical pain or 
decay, or some loss of good men's respect and 
confidence, or some remorseful memories, or, 



260 



Hath God said it ? 



worst of all, perhaps, the loss of moral sensibil- 
ity, or that hardness of heart and that death of 
the soul that gayly exults in evil and infamy and 
makes its shame its glory. God hath said it, and 
all human experience re-affirms it. 

Take your religious ideas and your moral faith 
from what source you will, from the Bible records, 
from your own soul's intuitions or inductions, or 
from the last results of science ; no matter which, 
for they all agree on this point, — that as to these 
prohibitions and penalties God hath said it, and 
this law is the surest of facts. As has been well 
said, " Opinions alter, manners change, creeds 
rise and fall, but the moral law is written upon 
the tablets of eternity. For every false word or 
unrighteous deed, for cruelty and oppression, for 
lust and vanity, the price has to be paid at last. 
Justice and truth alone endure and live. Injus- 
tice and falsehood may be long lived, but dooms- 
day comes to them in the end." 

None of us are so old or so strong as not to 
need the warning. Let him that thinketh he 
standeth take heed lest he fall. But it is around 
the young heart that the serpent likes best to 
wind its glossy coil, and whisper the fatal doubt, 
" Hath God said it ? " Young men in the new 
press and whirl of life's business and pleasure, 
in the bewilderment of passion and in the dazzle 
of falsely shining opportunity, and in the too 
easy-going morality of society, are peculiarly ex- 
posed to the wiles of the doubting tempter. And 
earlier than that, even, the peril begins. Boys ! 



Hath God said itt 261 

dear boys ! listen to me a moment. You hardly 
need that I should tell you what things are right 
and good to do, and what are forbidden and 
wrong; your own hearts have already divined 
the difference. But whenever you are tempted 
to do a wrong thing, then will you remember what 
I have told you to-day, that God hath said it, and 
when you doubt that you are lost and the ser- 
pent is strangling the best life out of you, and so 
long as you remember it and drive away the 
doubt, your life shall be beautiful and noble and 
happy. 

Never say of any wrong thing, "Just this 
once," for then you will be almost sure to say, 
"Just once more," till at last "Just this once" 
has grown into "There's no harm in it; who's 
afraid ? " Set your heel promptly and firmly on 
that foul serpent, and for his accursed doubt give 
him back your strongest certainty, your truest, 
noblest assertion, " God hath said it." 



1871. 



XIX. 



RIGHTEOUSNESS FIRST. 



But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness ; and all 
these things shall be added unto you. — Matt. vi. 33. 



E have had here lately a series of dis- 



V V courses, without much order indeed, and 
with some interpolations, but in some sense a 
series, trying to show the connection between 
the religion of Christ and morality, or that relig- 
ion is ethical in its basis and substance, and that 
its founder's principal aim was to enjoin just con- 
duct, righteous living in its broadest sense, includ- 
ing all moral excellence, sweetness, and purity, 
leaving all else in life second and subordinate. 

But things may be secondary and yet of great 
importance, and holding things subordinate does 
not mean that they are to be suppressed or ig- 
nored. Our view, therefore, of the Christian 
system would not be complete unless we consid- 
ered what is the place and what are the relative 
claims of things secondary and subordinate. 

The moral laws, though the highest, are not 
the only laws of this universe. Righteousness, 
or Tightness, or moral obedience, whatever we 
may call it, is the best thing for man, but not the 




Righteousness First. 



263 



only thing that befits him, or that his Maker pro- 
vides and intends for him. God would have men 
morally right and holy before all things else ; but 
He would have them much else besides. Jesus, 
in our text, puts righteousness first, but says that 
other things will be added. These other things 
which He had just mentioned are meat and drink 
and raiment, or, in a larger statement, things 
necessary or convenient in our life, things for 
the body and the senses, things beautiful and 
pleasant, the world's good things of benefit and 
pleasure. " Your heavenly Father," He says, 
"knoweth that ye have need of these things." 
There is no morality in getting or receiving or 
enjoying these things. But in the order and 
structure of the world they are adapted to man 
and man to them, by a law which is of divine 
enactment, though distinguishable from the moral 
law, to be respected, therefore, in subordination 
to the moral law, whose prerogative it is to super- 
vise the degree and the manner in which these 
things may be sought and enjoyed. 

Then in the opposite direction, at the opposite 
pole, there are spiritual things, offices of piety, 
modes of worship, beliefs respecting things in- 
visible, respecting God and the unseen hereafter, 
faiths, ordinances, rituals. Experience shows 
that there is implanted in men a proclivity to 
these things, a want of them, great comfort and 
enjoyment in them. There is a correspondence 
between them and the structure of the human 
soul. There is, therefore, a divine law respecting 



264 Righteousness First. 

them. To indulge in and cultivate them is ac- 
cording to a law of God ; not a part of the moral 
law, distinct from that, secondary to that, not 
so obligatory as that, not to be put in compe- 
tition with that, subordinate, but still a divine 
law. Jesus himself expressed in words, and still 
more in his life, how precious and important He 
deemed these spiritual matters for Himself and 
disciples. We should hardly know Him apart 
from these. Yet they were not fundamental with 
Him as the moral law was. He did not incul- 
cate tliem with the same explicitness and ur- 
gency, did not command them in the same tone 
of authority as He did righteousness and kind- 
ness and purity and fidelity. He did not make 
them the prime essentials of life, as He did 
obedience to the moral law. He gave them a 
high and large place, but not the highest and 
largest, good and precious, though not first and 
best. 

Now there are persons who put this spiritual 
law, and the offices of piety, in the paramount 
place, above even the law of righteous living. 
And also, there are other persons who practically 
place the goods and pleasures of the external 
world foremost, and whose theory of life is to get 
and enjoy as much of them as they can without 
permitting the moral law to interfere. And there 
are still others who make the moral law supreme, 
sometimes to the virtual exclusion of one or both 
of the other two. 

Let us see what results these three tendencies 



Righteousness First. 265 

or theories of life lead to. And we can see this 
best, not by looking at individuals, but at a race, 
a class, or an epoch in history. 

The ancient Greeks furnish an illustration of 
the worldly and sensual theory of life. They 
knew nothing better than pleasure as the chief 
good and highest aim of life. Their religion was 
the worship of the beautiful. Their highest per- 
fection was that of the bodily form and its senses. 
Their devoutest hymns on solemn occasions were 
but transcendental love-songs. They had no idea 
of morality except as a display of social good- 
nature and obedience to the laws of the land. 
Their mythology was purely ornamental. To 
enjoy life in a superficial and sensual way was 
the supreme business of life. And the fine ge- 
nius and taste of that people preserved this the- 
ory of life from abuse and degradation as far 
and as long as such preservation can ever be 
possible. The theory had with them the fairest 
possible trial, but it failed. It proved to have 
two radical defects. First, it made no provision 
for pain and sorrow, provided no refuge or sup- 
port for the afflicted and distressed ; and as these 
constitute a very large class everywhere, a class 
to which multitudes always belong, and to which 
everybody, sooner or later, belongs for a time, 
the masses of the people were ready to listen to 
the Christian missionaries, whose appeal were 
specially addressed to that class. And secondly, 
this way of life could not make the state strong 
and enduring. It ran out, by an inevitable ten- 



266 Righteousness First. 



dency, into luxury, sensuality, profligacy, effemi- 
nacy. Manly strength decayed, patriotism per- 
ished, the country perished, the system collapsed. 
It would not do. Men and nations cannot live 
long by it and be strong and self-preserving. It 
is in violation of the eternal laws, the fixed order 
of things. The moral laws were subordinate, 
and indeed faintly recognized. They were a splen- 
did race, with the rarest and most brilliant en- 
dowments, physical and mental. But the law of 
things cannot be disregarded with impunity. They 
disappeared from among the powers of the world, 
and their posterity, even in day, this cannot be 
built up into a respectable nationality. 

Observe now an experiment of an opposite 
kind, that was tried later and on a larger field, 
and which was, in a manner, the natural reac- 
tion from the Greek experiment, which was also 
largely the experiment of Rome in its later days. 

In the Middle Ages, under a perverted form of 
Christianity, Europe was given over, as one man, 
to a religion of pietism and rituality. The Catho- 
lic church was the recognized representative and 
organ of the heavenly powers ; to rest in its bo- 
som, and have its favor and benediction, was 
the highest earthly condition. It was salvation 
and peace. The pure and lofty morality of Jesus 
Christ was a secondary thing, and it could not 
bless or save a man. In its place were sub- 
stituted submission to the church, to assent to 
what it proclaimed as true ; penance, confession, 
prayers, vigils, processions, bead-counting, knee- 



Righteousness First. 



267 



bendings, absolutions, anointings (things which 
gave the priesthood power and money), and 
which the people thought were more efficacious 
for salvation than moral goodness. Life in a 
monastery, spent in seclusion, in ascetic prac- 
tices and continual prayer, was the high-road to 
heaven. The theory was not sensual, and it was 
not moral, but the extreme of spiritualism. It 
thought to please God best by renouncing the 
world, — both its enjoyments and its duties. A 
hyper-spiritual law was made to supersede all 
other laws. Shams usurped the place of realities. 
Ecstatic superstitions reigned under the name of 
the simple, practical, moral Jesus Christ. 

Of course such a theory of life could not stand. 
Intellectual stagnation, besotted ignorance, and 
moral corruption were its results. Society rot- 
ted, and the church, even to its inmost recesses, 
was the foulest part of it. The great laws always 
vindicate themselves, and sweep away obstruc- 
tions. Under the heavy blows of Luther and his 
coadjutors the system fell throughout a large part 
of Europe, and was weakened and modified in the 
rest of it. The nightmare of a predominant and 
exclusive pietism was thrown off, and a happy de- 
liverance for mankind it was. 

Turn now to another experiment on a narrower 
arena, but sufficiently large : Puritanism in Eng- 
land in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 
This was a reaction from the popish corruptions 
of the Middle Age, such as I have described them, 
and which were continued, abated, but not re- 



268 Righteousness First. 



moved, by the semi-reformation in England. In 
dogmatic and metaphysical theology this did not 
change much. Their theology was substantially 
the same that was taught by St. Augustine in the 
fourth century. It had been systematized and 
reinforced in the clear, strong, steely brain of 
John Calvin. 

The Puritans divested the forms and offices of 
worship of all the popish and Anglican ceremo- 
nial, all pomp and show, stripped the priesthood 
of their fine vestments, and the churches of pict- 
ures, images, and all adornments, and all that 
addresses the imagination and the taste, — made 
everything bald, hard, and dry. Whatever had 
been attractive in worship was to them mara- 
natha, — a device of Antichrist. 

The Puritan reaction was almost wholly in the 
interests of morality, a war against the flagrant 
vices of the time, which pervaded society and 
defiled the inmost sanctities of the church itself, 
and cloaked themselves under the very observ- 
ances and rites of religion. 

The Puritans, shocked and disgusted by a 
wickedness that threatened to dissolve human 
society, proposed to themselves the noble enter- 
prise of bringing in the kingdom of God and the 
reign of righteousness, and of crushing out every- 
thing that stood opposed thereto, by mild means 
if possible, but by fines, imprisonments, maim- 
ing, and death, if necessary. They would have 
no divine laws but moral laws, no arbiter but 
conscience, no purpose in life but to be righteous, 
no secondary or subordinate ends of existence. 



Righteousness First. 269 



Here was their mistake. The grandest design 
ever undertaken by men since Christ and his 
apostles was ruined by the narrowness and ex- 
clusiveness of its champions. Their administra- 
tion of religion was little more than a whip of 
scorpions to drive men into good morals. They 
saw the fiery wrath of God brooding over a 
wicked world. Hell gaped at their feet. The 
terrors of the Lord hung like a pall of midnight 
darkness over a lost world. They were mostly 
sincere; they were sallow, gloomy, joyless men, — 
joyless except from the occasional flashings up 
of the hope or assurance of personal salvation. 
And yet they had an earnestness that made them 
brave and strong. They saw no fit place or time 
for the gratifications of sense and the enjoyments 
of the world. They denied themselves these 
things, and when they got the power they denied 
them to others. Sins were enacted into crimes. 
The fears of conscience were converted into laws 
of the state. Personal asceticism grew into pub- 
lic tyranny. Theatres were closed, and the actors 
whipped, according to law, at the cart's tail. Sun- 
day was required to be observed with more than 
the rigor of the Jewish Sabbath. Even children 
were "subjected to corporal punishments for any 
levity, any games or amusements. Christmas, 
and all holidays in which grown people, or chil- 
dren even, were made merry, were abolished. 
The only pleasure which they retained and per- 
mitted was that of psalm singing, and that with a 
dreary monotony of tunes. In all good faith they 



270 Righteousness First. 



meant to make the world strictly, absolutely, only, 
moral, — that and nothing else, — no other inter- 
ests or enjoyments. 

Out from this body of men, some two hundred 
and fifty years ago, came those Pilgrim Fathers of 
ours, to Plymouth and Boston. Their anniver- 
sary occurs this week, the twenty-first. I usually 
notice it here at this season, and always with the 
grateful and admiring reverence which I feel 
for them. Among them were some of the best 
and noblest of Englishmen and of the Puritans. 
Never a state had a more grand, solid, and con- 
secrated founding than they gave to this state of 
ours. Strength, heroic courage and fortitude, 
self-sacrifice, singleness of purpose and practical 
wisdom, have never had a more perfect embodi- 
ment or a more shining illustration in all the 
world than in the work and purpose of those men 
here in New England. 

But their theory of life, and their view of God's 
will, was not sound, not comprehensive, and 
could not endure. Their theology, which indeed 
was not specially theirs, still survives, with vari- 
ous modifications and softenings. Their theory 
of life still lingers in some sects, some families, 
and in some individual minds, both in New and 
Old England ; but its foothold is limited and con- 
stantly narrowing. 

In this country, where there is such wide and 
free space, and where there has been a constant 
pouring in of all sorts of people and ideas, there 
has been, perhaps, at no time, any marked and 



Righteoicsness First. 



271 



violent reaction from the rigor of Puritan moral- 
ity. But in England, under very different cir- 
cumstances, that reaction was extreme and ap- 
palling. 

It came on at the Restoration, and the acces- 
sion of Charles II. Human nature could not and 
would not endure the pressure of Puritan rule 
any longer. It was against nature and the divine 
order of things. If you dam up the flowing wa- 
ters with masonry ever so strong, the gather- 
ing mass will become irresistible and finally force 
a passage through ; and not only that, it will in 
its mighty rush carry away the whole dam ; and 
not only that, it will scatter the stones and muck 
and all the debris over the fields below, sweeping 
away to destruction houses and crops and peo- 
ple, and spread hopeless desolation far and wide. 
So it was in England when the Puritan dam gave 
way. Pleasure which had been under ban, get- 
ting free again, ran hideous riot. Sensuality, de- 
bauchery in every form, took unlimited license, 
from king to peasant, from the court to the vil- 
lage. Duty, justice, honor, purity, everything 
high and sacred, from having been associated 
with the hateful Puritan austerity, became the all 
but universal scoff. The animal chained so long 
broke loose now, and rushed into vices the most 
brutal, the coarsest, the most unbridled. "Then," 
says the historian, "came those days, never to 
be recalled without shame ; the days of servitude 
without loyalty, and sensuality without love, of 
dwarfish talents and gigantic vices, the paradise 



272 



Righteousness First. 



of cold hearts and narrow minds, the golden age 
of the coward, the bigot, and the slave." 

If you read the records of that time, you can 
but wonder how such a Sodom as England then 
was, could be spared, and become the compara- 
tively moral and steady-going England that we 
see her to-day. 

It would not be right to hold the Puritans 
morally responsible for such results, for nothing 
could be further from their intent, their character 
and their hopes ; but historically responsible they 
are, responsible as action is responsible for the 
reaction, the blow for the recoil, the first error 
for the opposite one that must succeed it. 

So we see the mistake, of the Puritans. They 
laid the true and only foundation of the social 
structure, or the individual character, which is 
righteousness ; but they would have nothing else 
but the foundation, no beautiful and well-propor- 
tioned superstructure, and so mankind would not 
live in their house, and in leaving it tore up the 
very foundations. 

Such are three experiments of living, as car- 
ried out to their legitimate and historical result of 
failure, in Greece, in the Middle Age of Europe, 
and in Puritan England. We see why they failed. 
Two of them gave the preeminence to the infe- 
rior law or interest, and the other put the right 
law foremost, but utterly renounced one of the 
others. 

So we are brought back to the position we 
started from, that of our text, righteousness, — 



Righteousness First. 



273 



the moral law first and foremost and supreme, 
but these other things to be duly respected and 
amply allowed for. 

We do not know what experiments are being 
tried now on a large scale by nations or races. 
Such experiments cannot be fully understood 
and measured till they are closed, and the ob- 
server stands at some distance in time. No age 
understands itself as a whole. But it ought to 
be quite clear what the theory of life is which 
any individual should aspire to live by in order 
to make his single experiment of living a success. 

That theory is this : The moral law supreme, 
rectitude, veracity, purity and kindness, first and 
best. No soul prospers, no life succeeds without 
these. Any surrender of these, or departure from 
them, even the least, is a flaw in our armor, a 
break in our defenses, a mistake that may ex- 
pand into untold ills, and any wide and constant 
departure from them involves utter failure, blight, 
and ruin. Nothing is good or safe for us that 
we do or get or enjoy in contravention of these. 
No man ever departed from these that he did 
not repent of it, if he ever awakened enough to 
see what he had lost or missed. 

But then the other things to be added ; and of 
these, first, the bounties and pleasures of the 
world ; not to appreciate and enjoy these is to 
suppress a part of our nature and disown a part 
of the legislation of God. The goods of earth , 
God made them and fitted them for use, and 
adapted our faculties and desires to the getting 
18 



274 



Righteousness First. 



and enjoyment of them, and it is useless for us 
to pretend to be wiser and holier than He. It is 
morbid to imagine that we despise them. All 
things beautiful are meant to attract and please 
and educate us, and it is folly to pretend to be 
above them, or try to keep the soul aloof from 
them. The senses and appetites are of God's 
planting, powers of his ordaining, and they are 
meant to be gratified, and cannot be suppressed 
without fatally disturbing the divine order. The 
supreme moral law, voiced in the reason and con- 
science, must keep watch over these, as is its sov- 
ereign right, not to suppress but to limit and sub- 
ordinate, to grant them all reasonable and safe 
indulgence and no more; to restrain them from 
the ruinous excesses into which they will run if un- 
curbed, ending in covetousness, miserliness, sen- 
suality, brutishness, a wasted body, an enfeebled 
mind, deadness and barrenness of soul, a failed 
life. First moral, then happy; first virtue, then 
pleasure ; first duty, then recreation ; first the 
right, next the beautiful and agreeable ; first the 
health and wealth of the soul, next the goods of 
the world. So much for the sensual and worldly 
side of things to be added to righteousness. 

And now for the other, the spiritual side, — the 
things of worship and piety. God makes provis- 
ion for these in the constitution of the soul, and 
they must not be renounced. Bald atheism, dead 
materialism, that never lifts its eyes above the 
earth, is a defective theory of life that can never 
give dignity to existence, or purity and strength 



Righteousness First. 



275 



to morals \ it tends to brutishness. Conscience 
cannot maintain its supremacy and never did, 
apart from reverence and the upward look. If 
we could see this theory of life tried on as large 
a scale as the others which I have brought to 
notice, we should see, I predict, a speedier and a 
more miserable failure. 

But what form must piety and worship take ? in 
what ideas or beliefs must it be embodied ? We 
cannot prescribe. Jesus himself did not dictate 
on this point with anything like the distinctness, 
emphasis, and authority that He did in reference 
to morality. He shows plainly what was the form 
or style of his own personal faith and piety. It 
was purely filial. He was as a child, and God 
the loving and careful Father, whom He looked 
up to, trusted, and obeyed. He loved to think 
that all men would come to feel so, and thus add 
sanctity and tenderness to the law of right, and 
give support and peace in trial and sorrow. But 
it appears that all men cannot take just his view, 
and who shall say that they must, uniformly and 
at once, though that is best and happiest. 

Why, do we not know that multitudes of his 
own disciples have worshiped a man as their 
highest ? And that for centuries they virtually 
worshiped a woman and addressed their prayers 
to her, and on her lavished the offerings of their 
homage, and built their dearest hopes on her 
love, — the love of the mother of Jesus. Well, 
they invested the objects of their worship with 
the highest attributes of beauty and perfection 



276 Righteousness First. 

they could conceive, and what could they do 
more or better, under whatever name or title they 
adored and trusted their highest. 

And now if there be persons who, under the 
new intellectual conditions of the time, with 
new philosophies developed by new methods of 
thought, cannot adopt the exact language or style 
of religious thought which Jesus did, or cannot, 
as his disciples have done, worship a man, nor 
even an idealized woman, but instead, an infinite, 
unknown, unnamed power and beneficence, sit- 
ting veiled and enthroned behind the moral and 
physical forces of the universe ; if, in all honesty 
and reverence, that is their highest, and if it in- 
spires them with awe and gives sanctity to the 
moral laws and gives them solace and light and 
strength in pain and darkness and sorrow and 
death, why should we object or refuse them the 
Christian name, if they like that name ? I love 
to think that Christ himself was so large, broad, 
tolerant, and catholic in his sympathies as not to 
disown such men, or even those who have wor- 
shiped a man or a woman, doing it according to 
their light, their thought, their needs, striving 
earnestly the while to obey their highest, in work- 
ing righteousness and doing good. 

Thus I have tried to unfold the true theory of 
life, as I think the Master would have me. First 
and supreme, on the central throne, God's eternal 
moral law, and then on the one hand the boun- 
ties of God, the delights of life, and the beauty 
of the world, and on the other hand the sancti- 



Righteousness First. 277 

ties and upliftings and solaces of piety ; these, 
too, are supplements, supports, defenses of the 
central throne. This, I think, is Christ's theory 
of life for man. I think He meant just what He 
said, " Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and 
his righteousness," which is that kingdom, and 
these things, in such measure as ye can attain to 
them, in such form as ye can accept them under 
your conditions of life and of thought, shall be 
added. 



1871. 



XX. 



HINDRANCES. 

Who did hinder you, that ye should not obey the truth ? — Gal. v 7. 

AND who or what hinders us, or anybody, 
from living by the truth that we know and 
the laws that we acknowledge ? Something does, 
for we see it in one another, and confess it in 
ourselves, that in many things, and perhaps in 
principal things, we are not what we should be, 
and fail to do as we ought to do. We do not 
realize our own ideals of a true life. We accept 
a higher standard than- we come up to. Excel- 
lent things of life and character are visibly within 
our reach ; but somehow we fail to stretch forth 
a hand to seize them, or if we do they slip out of 
our grasp and are gone. 

This experience is so common, and in some 
degree it is so universal, that the problem how to 
account for it and what to do about it has exer- 
cised the minds of philosophers and theologians 
in all ages, and each definite solution of it has 
become a separate religion or creed or sect. It 
seems to have been the bottom question in most 
systems of human nature and -destiny. 

Zoroaster founded an extensively prevalent re- 



Hindrances. 



279 



ligion on the idea that the world is governed by 
two powerful and co-equal beings or principles, 
the one working for good only, and the other for 
evil only, and the result of the perpetual and ir- 
reconcilable conflict is what we see and feel and 
wonder at. 

This theory is repeated in another form, in the 
modern idea which we are familiar with, repre- 
senting this world as the battle-field in which 
God and the devil are fighting it out, — human 
souls being the stakes, with heaven and hell as 
the two opposite destinations. 

St. Paul evidently held one of the philosophies 
prevalent in his day, which represents the spirit 
or mind of man as being all right, and tending 
only to goodness, and the body as the drawback, 
the hostile power warring against the good, and 
tending only to evil. But Christians have not 
widely accepted this view. 

The more received belief in Christendom has 
been in this wise, — that man was originally made 
upright and pure, and inclined only to good ; but 
there was a catastrophe, a fall, back there at the 
beginning, and since that human nature has been 
in a ruined state, and all men disinclined to good 
and incapable of it; and that the remedy was 
offered in the death of Christ, re-creating, renew- 
ing the nature of man, restoring it to its original 
condition of purity and righteousness through 
faith in Christ. 

The difficulty with this last theory is, that the 
facts of life do not correspond to it with sufficient 



280 



Hindrances. 



accuracy, for it is found that where no such re- 
creation or restoration has taken place, nor even 
the name or coming of Christ been heard of, 
„ there have been some good men, and everywhere 
many good traits and actions, and that when the 
re-creation has taken place, in the most approved 
manner, much evil of disposition and conduct 
still remains, and the same old conflict between 
good and evil has to be carried on, with varying 
and uncertain results. The saints are not always 
so absolutely good, or the sinners always so ut- 
terly bad as to verify the theory with sufficient 
distinctness. 

Being myself neither theologian nor philoso- 
pher, in the accepted sense of the terms, I do 
not know that I have any new theory to propound. 
I only wish to consider the obvious facts of the 
case as they present themselves to the conscious- 
ness of thoughtful persons, and interpret them 
according to common sense, and for practical 
uses. 

The matter of fact statement of the case seems 
to be about this ; that there are in each human 
being the elements which, if they were developed 
fully and in due proportion, would result in a 
high, harmonious, admirable character, — the 
germs of all the excellent and beautiful growths 
which we here and there witness, separately, for 
the most part, but sometimes in large and happy 
combinations. There is nothing in the noblest 
character that has adorned the world, but that 
che faculty or sentiment from which it has grown 



Hindrances. 



281 



was planted in you or me or even in the worst 
person we know of, and is there still, some trace 
or remnant of it, however suppressed and hidden 
from sight, and it may be hidden for the most 
part even from consciousness. 

But, then, why does not the good seed spring 
up and bear its appropriate fruit ; why such poor 
results, why such partial failures and so many 
absolute and miserable failures ? Nothing is 
gained towards the solution of the question by 
looking far ofT for some mysterious cause of the 
failure or sources of the mischief, such as an in- 
visible, powerful, personal devil, always intent orr 
misleading and ruining us by his treacherous 
wiles ; or a mighty, malignant, abstract enemy 
called sin, infusing its subtle spiritual poison into 
our veins ; or a pre-historic and imaginary event 
called the fall of Adam, in which we sinned all. 
Such hypotheses as these explain nothing ; they 
only throw the difficulty farther back, and raise 
questions just as hard to answer as the original 
ones. 

We need not go outside of ourselves and cir- 
cumstances to find the cause of all this failure 
and short-coming, or the things which hinder us 
that we should not obey the truth. 

These hindrances are nothing else than certain 
other elements of our nature, which are useful in 
their place and necessary in their degree, yet of 
inferior dignity, but which, from unfortunate sur- 
rounding influences acquire too much growth and 
strength and mass, in us and over us ; certain 



282 



Hindrances. 



wholesome appetites intensified into morbid crav- 
ings ; certain proclivities fostered into devouring 
passions ; certain trivial acts grown into tyranni- 
cal habits ; certain qualities in us which have a 
use as brakes to hold back, to moderate and 
steady, but too much used or indulged, grow into 
suppressive powers, crushing weights, — into apa- 
thies and indolences, crippling, neutralizing the 
higher energies of our being. 

Such and such like are the hindrances, one of 
them here, another there, and in some instances 
all of them seeming to gather about an individ- 
ual, to run him down to the lowest point in the 
scale of character, — the lower elements in turn 
overwhelming the better ones, as they do more 
or less in all. They are the rust that impedes 
fine machinery; they are as untimely frost nip- 
ping the tender fruit buds ; they are as the hot 
sun withering unscreened flowers in the summer 
drought ; they are the deep mire that detains the 
traveler from his journey's end ; they are land- 
slides of sand and shingle and barren rubbish, 
covering up the richer soil and stunting and hid- 
ing its nobler growths. 

In the outer shed of the sculptor's studio there 
lies a block of marble. To the common eye it is 
rough, shapeless, and ungainly, with no form or 
comeliness. But to the artist's eye there stands 
imprisoned within that jagged mass, the limbs, 
the features, the matchless shape of an Apollo. 
He sees it, and it only needs disincumbering to 
be visible to all eyes. With his various tools, 



Hindrances. 



283 



some heavy and some delicate, he breaks off 
chips, polishes away all the obstructing mass, till 
he comes to the god within, and there it is at 
last, and now you see it as he saw it from the 
first. He has created nothing, added not a par- 
ticle to it, brought nothing from abroad to adorn 
it or round it out in the perfection of curve and 
polish. He has only set it free, and behold now 
what was there before, but now become visible 
to the dullest eye, the perfect type of manly 
strength and grace. 

It is somewhat so with any rough block of liv- 
ing humanity. It may be very uncouth in shape, 
repulsive to sight and taste, filthy with vices, 
heavy with sloth, distorted, jagged, looking fit 
only to be put away in a prison or a lazar-house, 
or the friendly refuge and concealment of a 
grave. Yet underneath these wrappings so foul 
and coarse and thick, could they be removed, 
would be found the moral features and vitalities 
of a true and strong manhood. The germ of 
every admirable quality is there, not perished, 
though latent and weakened • pressed down but 
not destroyed affections ; faculties not dead but 
sleeping, which if reached, wakened, would show 
forth "the true presence of a child of God, a spark 
of heaven's fire, a ray of heaven's light, impris- 
oned at the centre, for which there may be small 
hope that it will ever get released and shine out 
on earth, but which in other realms of being may 
yet shine as the stars. 

There are gems in the slime and sand of river 



284 



Hindrances. 



bottoms, without form or lustre, that require but 
to be dug up and touched by the lapidaries' tools 
to become fountains of light so pure and dazzling 
that only kings could compete for the possession 
of them. There are dumb clocks which need 
only that the detent be lifted, and they would 
ring out the bright hours of a child's holiday, 
or a marriage-feast. And there are souls all 
buried in the slime and rust, that want but to 
be disengaged and cleansed, to make them the 
mates of the world's saints and heroes. 

But extreme cases are not the most practical 
to consider. Take the average and general ex- 
perience. Take our own. We here, it may be 
presumed or hoped, are not among the most 
deformed and depraved in spirit, and yet we 
can claim no preeminence, no exemption from 
the world-wide disfigurement and short-coming. 
Whatever others may say of us, either of too 
much blame or too much praise, we know too 
well our own haltings and failures, the capabili- 
ties in us that have borne imperfect fruit or none, 
results falling so far short of our own bright 
ideals, inner promises and possibilities that look 
so small in their judgment, the road opened to 
us back there that should have led us direct up 
to the shining heights of achievement and excel- 
lence, and here we are loitering midway or turned 
off into side-paths, or possibly faced round and 
drifting down. 

Why this poor outcome ? What is the matter ? 
Perhaps by careful scrutiny we could discover, 
each in his own case, what the hindrance is. 



Hindrances. 



285 



I have already mentioned the hindrances in a 
general way, — what the Bible calls besetting 
sins. Appetites over-indulged and overgrown, 
for pleasure, stimulation, excitement, gain, or 
any worldly advancement, begetting moral apa- 
thy, irresolution, dimness of vision, deadness of 
conscience and will, and so our higher aspira- 
tions and faculties get clogged, overlaid, buried 
up, and we do not get on as we might and meant 
to, and are not coming out as we hoped and in- 
tended, — aye, and still hope and intend, I trust 
we may say. 

And now what is to be done about it ? For it 
is not yet too late. It is not night yet, — nor the 
day's reckoning closed. And we are not quite 
at the bottom of the hill ; we are not absolutely 
spell-bound or hamstrung ; not stuck fast in the 
mud, nor buried under mountains of obstruction ; 
the sense and hope of freedom and of power not 
wholly extinguished. 

What will make the hold-back let go ? What 
will lift the detent for us, and set our best ener- 
gies free ? The good old theology answers, " It 
is the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, that must 
do it for us ; that is effectual, and nothing else 
is." "And that is not bad philosophy, even if it 
were not the Scripture doctrine, which it is. It 
has the supreme merit of recognizing the univer- 
sal laws, of setting human and individual efforts 
and intents in the direction of the divine cur- 
rents, and of identifying all the separate forces 
of nature and the soul with the one infinite force 



286 



Hindrances. 



that underlies and comprehends them all. The 
doctrine of the Holy Spirit is sublime, simple, 
philosophical. Only we must remember that 
God's Spirit acts in no capricious, arbitrary, or 
wholly unintelligible way. It acts by laws as 
uniform and harmonious as those which govern 
the spheres or the tides, some of which laws we 
can discern, and the others not yet discovered 
we must suppose operate as uniformly. It acts 
through channels and agencies, many of which 
we can distinguish and understand, and in our 
need we must look chiefly to these channels and 
agencies which we know, and know how to make 
use of. Time and experience may reveal others. 

And, without doubt, the agency through which 
the Spirit acts most universally and most effect- 
ively in liberating the mind from its clogs and 
hindrances, is the human agency, the influence 
of other minds. Almost any man who has in 
any good measure overcome his hindrances, and 
got into possession of his best faculties, and done 
his work well in the world, would tell us in his 
confidential moments how he owes his most 
efficient deliverances, and the inspirations that 
called forth his energies and gave him success, 
to some one or several persons, who by their 
writings, their speech, or their characters, some 
sort of mental contact with him, have seemed to 
set him free from the hostile forces that would 
have hindered him, or that perhaps have long 
hindered him. 

As I write, my eye falls on a page in a lecture 



Hindrances. 



287 



addressed to the students of an English college. 
The author of it is one of the most eminent of 
the scientific men of the time. A master in the 
realm of knowledge, and of thought, and of ex- 
pression also, — a felt and recognized power in 
both hemispheres. He is moralizing in that part 
of his discourse, and he gives his young men a 
passage from his own most vital experience. I 
should infer that his chief hindrance in his youth, 
the thing that threatened to defeat his life, and 
suppress him, was not a passion or a vice, but 
sluggishness, a constitutional inertia. 

He tells them how much he owed to two writ- 
ers, — and they are writers so peculiar that while 
they strongly influence some minds with whom 
they have close affinity, they fail altogether to 
reach or touch a still larger class, who need an- 
other class of guides and inspirers. Let me 
freely quote from the passage : — 

" It is vain, I think, to attempt to separate 
moral and emotional nature from intellectual nat- 
ure. Let a man but observe himself, and he 
will find, if I mistake not, that in nine cases out 
of ten, moral or immoral considerations, as the 
case may be, are the motive force that pushes 
his intellect into action. The reading of the 
works of two men, neither of them imbued with 
the spirit of modern science, neither of them, in- 
deed, friendly to that spirit, has placed me here 
to-day. These two men are the English Carlyle 
and the American Emerson. I must ever re- 
member with gratitude that through three long, 



288 



Hindrances. 



cold German winters, Carlyle (not by his pres- 
ence, but by what he had written) placed me in 
my tub, even when ice was on its surface, at five 
o'clock every morning ; not slavishly, but cheer- 
fully, meeting each day's studies with a resolute 
will, determined, whether victor or vanquished, 
not to shrink from difficulty. I never should 
have gone through Analytical Geometry and the 
Calculus had it not been for these two men. I 
never should have become a physical investiga- 
tor, and hence without them I should not have 
been here to-day. They told me what I ought 
to do in a way that caused me to do it, and all 
my consequent intellectual action is to be traced 
to this purely moral source. These unscientific 
men made me a practical scientific worker. They 
called out "Act ! " I hearkened to the summons, 
taking the liberty, however, to determine for my- 
self the direction which effort was to take." 

Published biographies and private unwritten 
lives are full of experiences of this kind, showing 
how much men have owed or thought they owed 
to one book or writer or another, as having given 
them the first, or the most powerful impulse that 
made them what they are. 

I remember that Dr. Channing relates that in 
his youth he was powerfully affected by the writ- 
ings of Dr. Price, a philosophical writer of the 
last century, now scarcely known ; that Price first 
gave him such a conception of great principles 
that from that time through his whole life he 
wrote the words Love and Right with a capital, 



Hindrances. 



289 



and that he became inspired with that spiritual 
philosophy that made his own writings so famous 
and his influence so wide — becoming himself in 
turn an inspiring force and a strong arm of help 
to multitudes. 

Thirty or forty years ago many of the first 
minds of England, and not a few in America, as- 
cribed a regenerative power over themselves and 
minds of their kind to the poetry of Wordsworth. 
And perhaps a still larger number acknowledge 
an equal debt to Coleridge. 

The writer whom I have just quoted, who con- 
siders that the books of two of his elder contem- 
poraries were absolutely the making of him as 
having first set his mind free, and set him to 
work with all his might, — I imagine that he him- 
self, by his scientific revelations, his public dis- 
courses, and his high moral appeals is a power 
among the new generations of England, who listen 
to him eagerly as one who awakens the dormant 
faculties and makes them act from the level of 
their best thoughts. 

A very large class of persons are more touched 
and energized by such devotional and practical 
writers as Thomas a Kempis, who we may sup- 
pose Has found more responsive readers than 
any other writer, from the fact that more copies 
of his work, "The Imitation of Christ," have 
been printed than of any other book in any lan- 
guage. People do not permanently and contin- 
ually addict themselves to any book but such as 
addresses itself to their best thoughts and helps 
19 



290 



Hindrances. 



them to get possession of themselves and their 
own faculties. 

In the Middle Ages all serious people literally 
fed on the lives of the saints, — a meagre and 
scarcely wholesome diet, we might say ; but it was 
the best the age afforded, and tended to train the 
mind in the highest style of character that was 
then conceived of. 

In later times, in Puritan Protestant lands, 
such as Scotland and New England, we know 
how whole generations lived mentally and spirit- 
ually on their Bible, reading it through and 
through, and over and over, finding it for them 
the bread of life, — finding it the broadest chan- 
nel, of the Spirit, — and an energizing and sus- 
taining power in removing their hindrances and 
directing their lives. 

But books are only one of the agencies of the 
social power of God's Spirit. A still larger one in 
the aggregate, though not so conspicuous in single 
instances, is personal presence and weight. Not 
great writers exclusively, nor renowned thinkers, 
but obscure men and women with a large amount 
of mental and moral vitality in them, exercise this 
liberating power over the smaller number they 
come in contact with. Meet one who thinks 
clearly and he helps to clear away your fogginess 
and perplexity of thought. Force of will, decis- 
ion of character, in another, helps to lift the 
shackles of appetite or habit or sloth from your 
will by mere contact with you. The warm and 
tender-hearted intenerate your heart, breaking up 



Hindrances . 



291 



the icy crust that has gathered around it. Rich 
souls enrich other souls. The inspired inspire. 
The live soul is a battery charged unconsciously 
with spiritual magnetism which, if it touch us in 
life's jostle, sends a forceful thrill through every 
fibre of our being. Examples of noble living 
shame our slackness, and silently taunt us with 
our bondage, and strengthen us to burst our 
shackles. And what we get we also transmit. 

Do the young who hear me know, have they 
considered and fully taken it in, what potentiali- 
ties of character are lodged within them, requir- 
ing only the right impulse or influence to release 
them and bring them into action ? The germs, 
the potential qualities and faculties out of which 
has grown all the nobleness of action and char- 
acter that have graced the world, lie wrapt up in 
these brains and breasts. But perhaps there is 
some spell upon them, some clog, some detent, 
some hindrance, some masterful appetite or habit, 
or perplexity of thought, or indecision or slug- 
gishness of will : take that off and they shall 
rise like a released Titan from his sleep, like a 
Samson from Delilah's lap, like a bird breaking 
through the tangles of the imprisoning net, like 
flame bursting through the incumbering ashes. 

What shall dissolve the hindering spell for 
them ? What shall lift the detent and set them 
free to become their possible selves, and do their 
noblest work ? What and where is that liberating 
power ? 

The right word, the right influence, the right 



292 



Hindrances. 



thought, the right gleam, the right touch of power, 
the true open sesame is waiting for each one of 
them somewhere ; aye, and seeking them, going 
round and round them, passing on before, com- 
ing up behind, a book, a voice, a presence, an 
example, a providence, a shock, a force, a gentle- 
ness, I know not what. Let them await it ; nay, 
go out to meet it, look and listen for it, put them- 
selves in the way of it, place themselves within 
the sweep of the divine currents ; let them wrestle 
with their good angels and force the blessing 
from them. Aspire and ye shall rise. Do the 
first thing and the next will disclose itself. Ask 
and ye shall receive. Seek and ye shall find. 
Knock and it shall be opened to you. 



XXL 



ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 

Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself. — 
Psalm 1. 21. 

THERE are two sources from which are de- 
rived the ideas or impressions that consti- 
tute man's conception of God ; one is the out- 
ward universe, the other is the mental universe ; 
one the natural order of material phenomena, 
the other the world of thought within, and it re- 
quires the suggestions derived from both these 
sources to constitute a sound and rational the- 
ology. If the idea of God be taken only from 
observation of material nature, the result is ma- 
terialism ; that is, God will be only the sum of 
blind, unintelligent, purposeless laws and forces, 
inherent in the material elements and particles 
that constitute the visible universe. If, on the 
other hand, our idea of Deity be derived only, or 
too exclusively from man's mental constitution, 
we fashion Him in our own image, and make 
Him too much like a man. This is the error 
which is implicitly rebuked in our text, and which 
must therefore engage our present consideration. 
We properly and necessarily ascribe certain 



294 



Anthropomorphism. 



attributes of the human mind to the divine mind, 
as, for instance, intelligence. We can conceive 
of but one kind of intelligence, with but differ- 
ence in degrees. And as God is intelligent, if 
He is anything, He must have our intelligence, 
only in an infinite degree. And we can conceive 
of only one principle of justice. Justice in God 
must be the same as in man, only perfect. And 
God's benevolence must be the same in principle 
as man's, however differently and more wisely 
exercised. But when we go farther, and ascribe 
to God the passions and imperfections of man, 
we degrade Him, we adopt unworthy concep- 
tions, we make Him altogether such an one as 
ourselves, and incur the rebuke in the text. 

This theological error is technially called an- 
thropomorphism, or, more exactly, anthropopathy. 
We need not, however, carry along with us these 
hard words. They mean, ascribing to Deity the 
passions and imperfections of a man, and the 
limitations of a human personality. 

This has been the error of all the degraded 
and savage tribes of men. They have worshiped 
or heeded, at any rate believed in, deities as 
senseless, as cruel, as degraded as themselves. 

But the higher, and even the highest forms of 
theology accepted by the advanced races have 
been vitiated in the same way. 

The Hebrew theology, as initiated by Moses, 
and developed by the great teachers and proph- 
ets, was immeasurably in advance of all the exist- 
ing theologies of those ages. It was unique and 



Anthropomorphism. 295 

sublime in its conception of the unity, the spirit- 
uality, and the moral righteousness which it as- 
cribed to its Jehovah. Yet, to the popular ap- 
prehension He was very human in his passions. 
He was as a man of war. He was given to 
wrath, and must be appeased by ceremonies and 
offerings. He could be flattered, coaxed, bribed 
into the granting of special favors. Men could 
gratify Him by oblations. He had his favorites. 
Though his commandments were righteous and 
holy, He could be bought off when disobeyed 
and offended. He was to be approached like a 
human despot, with presents, and conciliated by 
obeisances and money or money's worth. He was 
partial, capricious, jealous. In a word, He was 
like a man, and a Jewish man. Here and there 
a prophet or psalmist would rise above this low 
misconception of Deity, and even rebuke it, as in 
our text ; but neither psalmist nor prophet was 
wholly exempt from it. 

At length Jesus Christ appeared and attempted 
to inaugurate a new theological era. To the ap- 
prehension of his sublime soul and his sweet 
spirit, God was a transcendently lofty and pure 
Spirit, to be worshiped in spirit and in truth ; 
to be. obeyed, trusted, submitted to as a wise and 
loving Father, having human attributes, for He 
cannot be conceived of by man divested of these, 
but only the noblest attributes, such as shone so 
divinely in Christ's own exalted and beautiful 
nature — justice, but without anger or vindictive- 
ness ; love, without passion or jealousy ; grace, 



296 Anthropomorphism,. 

without caprice or partiality, no human blot or 
imperfection. If Christ's idea of God could have 
prevailed, then indeed the reign of truth were 
established, and the kingdom of heaven were 
come. 

But mankind were not prepared, intellectually 
or morally, to receive and entertain so pure and 
adequate an idea of God. And no sooner was 
the presence and personal influence of Jesus 
withdrawn than those who had assumed his 
name and who revered his memory, by an un- 
conscious necessity of their partially developed 
and imperfectly enlightened minds, lapsed back 
into the old Jewish or heathen conception of 
Deity, from which they have never got effectually 
weaned. And in one important particular they 
were led to exaggerate that Jewish conception 
and make it more pernicious. Observe how. 

Under the Jewish system the human caprices 
and passions ascribed to Jehovah were limited in 
their exercise to this present world, and of course 
men had their actual experience of the general 
orderliness and beneficence of the divine adminis- 
tration here, to check somewhat a too extrava- 
gant idea of the wild play of those caprices and 
passions. But Christians have had, what the 
Jews had not, the doctrine of immortality, of the 
future world as a sphere in which to give an in- 
finite scope for the play of those bad human dis- 
positions which they as well as the Jews ascribed 
to the Deity. Here was a field where common 
experience or common-sense could not come in 



Anthropomorphism . 



297 



to check any extravagance in which priestly 
policy, or the popular imagination and credulity, 
might be led to indulge. Accordingly, Christians 
have conjured up the idea of a future fiery hell. 
They have imagined and believed that God, with 
the vindictiveness and rage of cruelty character- 
izing an Oriental despot, only a thousand fold 
intensified, would find his glory and delight in 
plunging myriads of his creatures into that burn- 
ing abyss, to undergo its sharp torments forever. 
Thus, and only thus He could, they have thought, 
maintain the integrity of his righteous govern- 
ment and the stability of his throne. And this 
horrid fate, decreed upon men by their Almighty 
Creator for transgressions, imperfections, and 
short-comings which from their fallen and per- 
verted nature they were unable to avoid, could 
not be averted by any efforts of obedience, but 
only by special and exceptional grace, interposed 
here and there in connection with some doctri- 
nal scheme of salvation, or some ceremonial jug- 
glery. 

This horrible idea of God and of his future 
purposes has dominated the Christian world. It 
was, in its grossest form, the staple of preaching 
all through the Catholic Middle Age. It has 
been the basis of Protestant creeds and schemes 
of salvation, and has had possession of the imag- 
inations of men up to this hour, only softened 
and made to recede somewhat from the fore- 
ground of Christian belief during the present cent- 
ury. It has hung like a pall over the hopes and 



298 



A ntkropomorphism. 



joys and natural pieties of all the Christian cent- 
uries, making the Sovereign Ruler as it were a 
man, and weak, cruel, and implacable at that. 
A man, only a monster of a man. 

I do not wish to depreciate the world-wide 
Christian Church, or its leaders and teachers, 
more than truth and fact compel me. They have 
reasoned and acted according to their light. A 
pure, lofty, and rational theology is necessarily 
one of the last and slowest growths of the human 
mind. I gladly acknowledge that, while this con- 
ception of God as an imperfect man has bred 
untold misery, it has not been able to exclude 
from the minds of Christians all the benign and 
beautiful influence of the spirit and piety of Jesus 
Christ. Something of his sweetness and tone of 
moral purity has run through all the ages, soften- 
ing the evils and assuaging the sorrows of men 
in spite of the blighting effects of the anthropo- 
pathic theology. 

The narrow and degrading idea of God which 
we have been considering — the too human idea 
of Him — has in these latter days been powerful- 
ly, and I must think favorably, influenced by the 
rapid advances that are made in the study and 
knowledge of the material universe. The beau- 
tiful theology of the affections which Jesus Christ 
set forth has seemed to require for its own best 
efficacy a supplementing of the understanding, 
or scientific intellect, in order to restore it, and 
deliver it from the too human narrowness, the 
low anthropomorphism, into which it has fallen 



Anthropomorphism. 299 

in the Christian Church. And it may be hoped 
that the progressive science of the day will help 
to educate the general mind up to the point of 
spiritual enlightenment at which it can receive 
more profoundly, and with less of human alloy, 
the consummate heart-wisdom of the purest and 
best inspired of the sons of God. 

Consider some of the ways in which the prog- 
ress of science, or an increased knowledge of the 
laws and facts of the material universe, tends to 
divest the Deity, to our conception, of human 
passions and imperfections. 

The science of astronomy has had, and is hav- 
ing, a great influence in enlarging and exalting 
the idea of God. It reveals space beyond space 
in limitless extension, filled with worlds and sys- 
tems, ordered by one law, moved by one power, all 
their numberless intervolving systems constitut- 
ing one system, one creation, the domain of one 
supreme power. The mind that rises to some 
adequate, however limited and baffled, conception 
of this vastitude of substance, of extent, of might, 
and then attempts to conceive of the Power, the 
Being that shapes and rules the measureless 
whole, can but bow his head and veil his face in 
speechless awe, and, like Israel of old, scarcely 
dare "to utter his name or only give Him that sub- 
limest name of the ancient Scripture, I Am. 

That invisible I Am — He is here at our feet 
and about our path, and He is there in those far 
stellar spaces whose distance we can only meas- 
ure by the millions of years that it takes a ray of 



300 



Anthropomorphism. 



light to come from them to us, and which are still 
but the edge of the universe. To the All-seeing 
Eye the earth is but a dust particle, and the sun 
but' a point of light fading out of sight as you re- 
cede from it. 

Who that takes in this conception, even in the 
poor limited way that we can, would ever presume 
to form in his mind a human image of the I Am, 
or assign to Him, even in imagination, the limita- 
tions of a human personality ? 

Another way in which science affects our con- 
ceptions of Deity is by its persistent and success- 
ful method of showing all the observable facts 
and phenomena of nature and the universe to be 
reducible to general and uniform laws. No in- 
terruption of them to be found anywhere, in suns 
or systems, or invisible molecules, — and none 
conceivable to the disciplined reason, — no inter- 
ference, no catastrophes, but one unvarying and 
eternal order. This view of things may be said 
to be established in all scientific minds, and as it 
comes by degrees to be taken in by the general 
mind, it inevitably affects men's ideas of God. 
They learn to see in events no evidences of his 
literal pleasure or displeasure in any human sense 
of the words. They will cease to impute such a 
passion as anger or wrath to the Supreme. They 
will put away the childish terror that looks for 
special judgments upon special persons. They 
will know how to estimate such theories as those 
lately propounded by certain spiritual guides in 
Scotland, that the depreciation of railway scrip is 



A nthropomorphism. 



301 



a consequence of railway traveling on Sunday. 
They will cease to look for special providences, 
or exceptional mercies or favoritisms, and rise to 
the grander idea of a general providence that 
comprehends all persons and all events in the 
parental embrace of a universal and impartial 
care, and under the all-protecting beneficence 
of universal laws. In a word, as the established 
ideas of science pass down and become a part of 
the public thought, as they do so rapidly in these 
times, the Deity will rise, in the general mind 
from the narrowness and fickleness of anthropo- 
morphism, to a sublimer conception, more ade- 
quate if less definite, more serene, trustful, and 
peace-giving. 

But what is tending most powerfully to subli- 
mate our conception of Deity, and place his nature 
beyond analogy with the littleness and feebleness 
of human nature, is what is called the Evolution 
hypothesis, — I do not mean Darwinism, which is 
comparatively a matter of small detail, — I mean 
the theory first broached by the greatest minds 
of the last century, such as Kant and La Place, 
and now entertained, sifted, extended, by the 
leading minds of this generation • an hypothesis 
as yet, but master minds are moulding and devel- 
oping "it, and it bids fair to make its way into the 
general mind, and help to mould and modify the 
universal idea of God. 

From the examination of the solar system, Kant 
and La Place came to the conclusion that its va- 
rious bodies once formed parts of the same undis- 



302 



A nthropomorphism. 



located mass, and that mass a vast nebula, a fiery 
cloud, filling the space which the solar system 
now occupies ; that as the ages rolled away heat 
was dissipated, condensation followed, the plan- 
ets were detached before becoming solid, and by 
whirling and cooling became what we see them, 
but that the chief portion of the fire-cloud reached 
by self-compression the magnitude and position 
of the body which we call our sun. The earth 
itself offers evidence to the geologist of such a 
fiery origin, and the recent discoveries by the 
spectroscope prove that the same metallic sub- 
stances are common to the earth and the sun. 

Such is the outline of the theory as applied 
to formation of suns and planets. The general 
Christian mind is not yet prepared even to con- 
template the consequences of this theory when 
carried out. But we here, I think, are ready to 
face with candor and composure any theory that 
is presented to us by reverent and truth-seeking 
minds. The acceptance of it is another thing ; 
that comes later, if it comes at all. This theory 
put back the period of the fiat of creative energy : 
" Let there be light," — back beyond all known or 
calculable periods, into an immeasurable distance, 
when the worlds were a fire-cloud, and we know 
not how much farther, — and refers all the pres- 
ent existences and facts of the universe, all phe- 
nomena of motion, of life, and even of thought, 
everything that we see, hear, touch, and even the 
senses and faculties by which we discern them, to 
the operation of the same well-known forces that 



Anthropomorphism. 303 

are all the time playing around us now, and op- 
erating in just the same way. 

Says one, who by his scientific ability, and by 
the profound reverence that characterizes all he 
writes and thinks, is well entitled to expound the 
theory : " What are the core and essence of this 
hypothesis? Strip it naked," he says, "and you 
stand face to face with the notion that not alone 
inanimate forms of matter, not alone the more 
ignoble forms of animalcular or animal life, not 
alone the nobler forms of the horse and the lion, 
not alone the wonderful and exquisite mechanism 
of the human body, but that the human mind it- 
self, — emotion, intellect, will, and all their phe- 
nomena, — were once latent in a fiery cloud, so 
that at the present moment all our philosophy, all 
our poetry, all our science, and all our art — Plato, 
Shakespeare, Newton, and Raphael — are poten- 
tially extant in the fires of the sun." 
. But is not this atheism, or tending to it ? I do 
not see that it is. On the contrary, instead of dis- 
pensing with a Creator, I think I have never come 
into mental contact with a more sublime and im- 
pressive representation of a Creator's stupendous 
reach of mind. It does not solve the problem 
of the universe, and account for it without God, 
it only throws the problem farther back into the 
realm of the unknown. There are still open the 
old questions, only in new forms. Who kindled 
the flames of the vast fire-cloud ? Who spread 
it through the spaces of heaven ? Who charged it 
with germs and latent potentialities of all these 



304 



A nthropomorphism . 



orbed worlds, and these grand and beautiful ex- 
istences, these crystal forms in the earth, the 
tree, the flowers, the infinitude of animal forms 
and vitalities, this human body, brain, thought, 
feeling, will ? Who endowed it with all those 
forces of chemistry, gravitation, magnetism, mo- 
tion, heat, electricity, life, — which, operating 
upon these germs and potentialities, have slowly 
through the unmeasured ages evolved the suc- 
cessive stages of being, resulting now in this 
universe of life and order which we behold and 
form a part of ? Who or what did it ? Science 
does not answer, nor pretend to, nor by any 
searching can it find out. It only penetrates a 
little farther, step by step, from generation to 
generation, into the region of the unknown, an- 
nexing some small provinces to the realm of the 
known, while the infinite unknown remains un- 
penetrated and unapproachable beyond. Science 
cannot tell who or what did it. -But the pure rea- 
son, the devout and awed imagination, the instinct- 
ive faith, and the craving heart of man, every- 
where and forever answer God, using that word 
only as a name for its awful sense of an infinite 
and incomprehensible Intelligence and Power, of 
which we can know nothing, nor conceive any- 
thing, except those workings and results which 
we witness and feebly explore. Science in its 
utmost reaches of endeavor and achievement can- 
not, in its theological conclusion, go a jot be- 
yond, or come a jot short of that most ancient and 
sublime statement in the sacred book : " In the 



A ?i th rop o m o rpJi ism . 



305 



beginning," whenever, wherever, whatever that 
beginning was, — " In the beginning God created 
the heaven and the earth." 

The cry of atheism and infidelity has been 
raised at every step of theological reform in the 
whole world's intellectual progress. It has been 
heard in tones of alarm and abhorrence ever 
since Moses cast down the golden calf and pro- 
claimed the one invincible Jehovah ; ever since 
the prophets were stoned for declaring righteous- 
ness more acceptable to God than the blood of 
bullocks ; ever since Jesus Christ was crucified 
for blasphemy in outraging the prejudices and 
interests of the saintly Pharisees ; ever since 
Luther assailed the infallible and God-given au- 
thority of the popes and let in a flood of spirit- 
ual light upon Europe ; ever since our own im- 
mediate predecessors broke with the dark creed 
of Calvinism ; yet these have all proved to be not 
infidelity, but steps towards a purer, firmer, wider 
faith. And we may depend upon it that all the 
contributions which the scientific intellect is mak- 
ing to our knowledge of the universe will serve to 
establish the faith in God, and the throne of God, 
in human souls on a firmer basis of truth and 
reason, and will ultimately advance true religion, 
by divesting the idea of Deity of the human weak- 
nesses and littlenesses and meddlings and ma- 
lignities that have so darkened and degraded it 
heretofore. 

And now, if I can project his horoscope aright, 
I may venture to delineate the coming Christian 

:o 



306 Anthropomorphism. 



man, as he will stand in the full blaze of the light 
of this century and the next, the representative 
of its highest intelligence and character. 

The coming man, then, will not be an atheist, 
but will have the profoundest sense of an infinite, 
however inscrutable, Intelligence and Power pre- 
ceding and presiding over the world, and over all 
its forces, all its changes, and all its products. 
By the laws that govern every thoughtful and ele- 
vated soul, the coming man will worship and 
adore the Supreme, not by fawning and flattery, 
as if He were a man, but with tranquil wonder 
and admiring awe. He will not presume to read 
off the counsels of God, and jot them down in 
dogmatic creeds, or minute, specific articles of 
faith, but reverently study and strive to comply 
with them, as they from time to time open them- 
selves to view in the laws of the universe, and in 
the light of his reason, his conscience, and his 
pure and loving affections. 

The coming man will be a Christian who will 
care little for partisan churches and sects ; but 
I think he will never fail to see a reflection of the 
divine glory in the face and life of Jesus Christ. 

The coming man will pray with or without visi- 
ble forms and audible words. His thanksgiving 
will be a heartfelt and joyous appreciation of the 
bounties and beauties of God's world. His prayer 
for spiritual benefits will be an aspiration for 
strength, light, and an access of love and virtue. 
His prayer for temporal good will be no seeking 
of special favors, or to enlist the Supreme on his 



Anthropomorphism, 307 

side of a doubtful issue, or to change the courses 
of Providence for his special benefit and gratifi- 
cation. But his prayer will be a prayer of sub- 
mission and confidence, as knowing that the care 
and good-will and kindly law which includes all 
worlds and all creatures must include him, and 
cannot forget or neglect him. 

The coming man will thus be a man of faith. 
For the very essence and sum of religious faith 
is this trust, — unfaltering confidence in the 
supreme wisdom and goodness, — trust that all 
things are ordered well, and will come out well ; 
that there are no blanks, no mistakes, no failures 
in the divine order and plan ; that seeming evil 
is a phase of coming good ; and he may repose 
peacefully as in the very bosom of infinite wis- 
dom and love, which is capacious enough for him 
and for the world, and for the worlds beyond 
worlds through boundless space. 

The coming man, according to the measure of 
his faculties, will be a man of action. Active 
obedience will be his ruling principle, obedience 
to the known laws and will of the Supreme. 
Obedience running out into all duties, all prac- 
ticable self-culture, all serviceable, benevolent, 
and -affectionate activities among men. 

Finally, the coming man, remembering how he 
owes to new acquisitions of truth all his elevation 
and all his deliverance from the superstitions and 
errors that have enslaved and embittered life in 
past ages, will ever look for and welcome more 
truth, as being, for him as for all, light, power, 



308 Anthropomorphism. 



peace and gladness. He will have no fear of 
any inquiries ; will steady himself in front of 
every theory that commands his attention, desir- 
ing nothing but to know the truth, and fearing 
nothing but to believe a lie. 

So shall he go his way fearless and rejoicing 
through all the realms of thought and knowledge 
that open to him, striving through trust and obe- 
dience to fulfill the beautiful possibilities of his 
nature, till he comes even unto the stature of the 
fullness of Christ Jesus. 
1872. 



XXII. 



THOU SHALT SAY, NO. 
Thou shalt say, No. — Judges iv. 20. 

ABOUT fifty years ago, a very eminent min- 
ister of this neighborhood preached a ser- 
mon from this text, and repeated it in many, if 
not all, the liberal pulpits near Boston. The ser- 
mon made a deep impression, and is remembered 
to this day by many of the elders among us. I 
often hear it referred to even now by those who 
heard it. The text has since been regarded as 
the special property of the powerful preacher 
who used it to so much purpose, and I doubt if 
any other preacher, hereabouts, has presumed to 
use it since. But a new generation has arisen 
now, and it is time that that copyright should be 
considered as run out. 

It must be owned, however, that the text is of 
doubtful value after all. For if we should con- 
sider the connection in which it stands in the 
chapter, and the moral character of the transac- 
tion it refers to, and of the persqn who said it, 
and of the person to whom it was said, we should 
have to discard it as immoral, and no fit intro- 
duction to a practical discourse. 



310 Thou shalt say, No. 

But, like my predecessor, in the use of it I dis- 
own and ignore the connection, and only take it 
as a most forcible and convenient form of appeal 
to a certain function of the human will, which 
has a vital part to perform in the direction of 
life and the formation of character. 

A human being has his destiny, in some meas- 
ure, in his own hands, depending on his own 
voluntary determinations. We cannot define ex- 
actly the limits of the province of free will, but 
that it has a province, and an important one, all 
consciousness attests ; we cannot think it into un- 
reality ; we cannot adjust our speech into a denial 
of it. The animals are, and do what their con- 
stitution and the circumstances about them deter- 
mine, — no more, and no less. The tree is subject 
pnly to the fixed laws of its being and the out- 
side forces that act upon it. The oak must be 
an oak and only that, and it must sway unresist- 
ing before every breath of wind that visits it. It 
is affected by every beam of sunshine and by 
every drop of rain that comes to it. It must 
take up into itself just the elements that are 
found in the soil and the air in which it is placed, 
refusing none and adding none by any choice of 
its own. 

Man also is subject to those laws of his being 
which he had no choice in enacting, and to the 
outside influences which he does not invite, and 
they must needs go far towards deciding what 
manner of man he shall be. But not exclusively. 
He can enact laws for himself, impose actions 



Thou shalt say, No. 3 1 1 



upon himself, and, what it is our business to con- 
sider now, he possesses a certain qualified but 
real veto-power. He can, to a large extent, not 
suppress but repress, and hold in check, some of 
the laws and tendencies and demands of his own 
nature. And he can, in a degree, reject outside 
influences and solicitations, push them aside, 
defy them, avert them. He can veto them, can 
say " No," to them. 

And according as he says it, and says it on 
right occasions, says it promptly, decisively, and 
once for all, says it so, or fails to say it so, he 
maintains or surrenders the splendid self-sover- 
eignty of manhood. A brave, frequent, and ab- 
solute exercise of the veto-power with which he 
is endowed is one of the fixed conditions of suc- 
cess and honor in the world, of self-respect and 
dignity of character, of harmony with God and 
the happiness of life. 

And first, the exercise of this supreme power 
in reference to the tendencies and inclinations 
within one's self. There are tendencies and appe- 
tites in every man which, if allowed a free course 
and full swing, would drag him in the mire and 
hurry him to his ruin. The meanest of them has 
slain its thousands. So mean and paltry an ap- 
petite as that for stimulating drink counts its vic- 
tims by millions, and our nature is largely made 
up of such dangerous proclivities, some inborn 
and some acquired. There is in man, also, a 
certain inscrutable, central authority, the mys- 
terious Ego, the indefinable " I myself," whose 



312 



Thou shalt say, No. 



office is to watch over these necessary but dan- 
gerous members of the internal commonwealth, 
and keep them to their limits, and say No to each 
and all their demands for undue power and over- 
indulgence. No man can live at all without ex- 
erting this power at some points ; and no man can 
live nobly, and to the highest purposes of his 
being, without exerting it constantly, at all points, 
and with absolute supremacy. And it is not 
enough to let them balance one another, or to 
play off one against another. The sovereign 
power within, the inmost self, the inscrutable 
soul, whose presence none can define, and yet all 
are conscious of, must be ready and able to say 
to each and all of them in its turn, "Thus far 
and no farther." 

In the biographies of all persons eminent for 
character and achievement you will notice how 
they have striven to acquire perfectly this form 
of self-mastery, this power of denial. What in- 
genious devices and shrewd practices they have 
resorted to, to this end ! In some ages, what 
fasts and penances and seclusions and all forms 
of asceticisms, and in all ages what vigorous 
efforts, what watchfulness, and what contrivances 
and habits of self-discipline, whereby they might 
be able with promptitude and effect to say No to 
any tendency that is getting too strong, and any 
desire that is too clamorous ! And success in 
that is their salvation, the open secret of their 
success in their high aims, and the glory of their 
lives. They not only legislate for themselves as 



Thou shalt say, No. 313 

to what they will do, and which of their faculties 
shall be exerted, and which of their tendencies 
shall be pushed, but also which of them shall be 
denied and held back. Not only to which of 
them they shall say, — the central self shall say, 
— "Yes," and " Advance, go in," but as much to 
which they shall say, imperatively, " No \ halt, 
recede, be still." The veto stands next in im- 
portance to the initiative, and is equally indis- 
pensable for a good career and a well-governed 
life. 

Secondly, the circumstances and events around 
us. These are very powerful, seemingly irresist- 
ible often. They claim to take full possession 
of a man, to carry him whither they will, and 
make of him what they will. They seem to say 
to him, We are a part of the irresistible order of 
nature ; we move according to the eternal laws ; 
we represent the forces of the universe ; we come 
backed by the omnipotence of the Creator. What 
can you, poor, puny mortal, do in resistance to 
our overwhelming might ? A pitiful speck of be- 
ing as you are, an evanescent bubble on this vast 
sea of matter and force, what is there for you, 
but to drift whithersoever we may carry you, and 
sink where we drop you ? But not so, thou ma- 
jestic universe, bearing upon man as you do with 
all your infinite might in the events and circum- 
stances around us, — not so ! The soul in man, 
that mysterious essence, whose very existence 
you bring into question, is in its rightful prov- 
ince, and a splendid one too, is a match for you, 



314 Thou shalt say, No. 

can resist you, set you aside, say No to you, and 
in the ethereal, God-like power it is endowed 
with, and with the humility of a little child, make 
good its audacious defiance. 

The brave but wary seaman knows the tremen- 
dous power of an adverse wind, a power that 
nothing can withstand, — knows it and respects 
it, yet he is master of the situation. He can 
anchor in the roadstead, and look the very hurri- 
cane in the face, and let it blow. He will not 
budge. He can wait. That force will be spent 
before his will be. He will yet lay his course 
right along the pathway of the storm, and he 
does, and makes his voyage triumphantly. Or 
in another case he refuses to drift with it. He 
will move right on against the opposing force, 
and never stop a moment, nor furl his sails; he 
must beat, go zigzag, tediously, but he gets on, 
against it, and, if need be, he will make the entire 
Atlantic voyage without one favorable breeze, 
with hard struggles but no yielding, delayed but 
not defeated. 

So in all human life. The power of circum- 
stances must be respected, and dealt with val- 
iantly but warily. The true man will accommo- 
date himself to them, and yet refuse to drift with 
them ; nay, will circumvent them, outwatch them 
and make them serve his purpose. They may 
delay him but not turn him back, discourage him 
but not pluck heart of hope out of him. They 
may be too strong for the moment, then he can 
wait. They may block his way like a wall, then 



Thou shalt say, No. 315 



he will turn them. There are some things that 
they will not let him do, but there are as many- 
things he will not let them do. If they shut up 
one path, he opens another. They may change 
his direction, but not stop his progress. They 
may change the form of his duty, but cannot 
hinder doing. They may combine to tempt and 
assail his integrity or purity, but if he say in 
God's name, " No ! " they cannot touch it. The 
torture of the rack cannot wring it away from 
him, the fires of martyrdom cannot burn it out 
of him. 

So great is the power of that something in 
one's inmost self. Soul, is it ? Will, is it ? We 
cannot get at it, but it is there. It is but a speck, 
and not even that : but a spark, and not so much 
as that. No scalpel lays it bare, no anatomy re- 
veals it, it eludes the crucible and the micro- 
scope ; but it is a something that can stand up 
and say, " No ! " and all the things and forces of 
the visible universe must fall back, baffled and 
powerless before it. All men that live exercise 
this power in some degree, and some men, the 
noble and the saintly ones, how largely, how im- 
perially, how gloriously ! Verily the soul in man 
is a child of the Almighty God, in a sense that 
no other thing or creature is. Would that it bet- 
ter deserved its birthright, and exercised its high 
and almost divine prerogative. 

Thirdly. It is most practical to consider the 
exercise of this veto-power in refusing the re- 
quests of other persons. There are always about 



3i6 



Thou shalt say, No. 



us those who ask us or propose to us to do 
things that we ought not, or had better not do. 
And such is the strength of the social tie, and 
so potent the influence of another's desire, that 
there is always a disposition to comply, and an 
amiable disposition it is in itself. But it is 
often very misleading, and sometimes fatal to 
honor and integrity, to purity and peace and 
every dear or sacred interest of life. Many a 
youth and many a man, not depraved, but simply 
weak and unestablished, has thus been led to his 
ruin, out of mere good-natured compliance and 
the difficulty of refusing a solicitation. Balanc- 
ing between good and evil, with the promise and 
possibility of the best, he has gone to the bad, 
because he could not, or felt that he could not, 
say " No ! " The dangerous tendencies that are 
in him, and that are in everybody, acquire ten- 
fold power when reinforced by the importunity 
of a friendly companion to join him in giving 
way to them. That little off-hand suit, "Come 
along," coupled with the suggestion, "What 's the 
harm," or "Who will know it?" or "Just this 
once," or " Don't be a coward," we cannot tell 
how many it leads astray every day, initiates in 
the downward path, and that too when every 
•instinct of the conscience, every sentiment of 
honor, every affection of their heart, and every 
hope of their lives, is breathing its protest, and 
would hold them back. But it is so hard to say 
" No ! " to such appeals, and the friendly urgency 
overbears their scruples and carries them away. 



Thou shalt say, No. 



317 



If all those hesitating consents could now be 
recalled, those fatal compliances reversed, and 
it should be as if the rightful refusals had been 
spoken in place of them, what blessed results 
should we see. What uprisings from dishonored 
graves ; what long processions from out of prison 
walls ; what returning steps of fugitives and wan- 
derers to the homes they have left desolate ; what 
reappearances of disgraced men from the seclu- 
sions that hide their shame ; what reentering of 
blighted names on the roll of honorable and fair- 
famed men and women ; what a healing of bleed- 
ing hearts and uplifting of bowed heads ; what 
.a turning back of a large portion of the tide of 
comfortless and ineffectual remorse that flows 
over the world ! But, alas ! it is too late ! too 
late ! The fatal assent cannot be withdrawn. 
That little word, the decisive, the saving word, 
cannot be spoken now. The dreadful tide rolls 
on, for it must. 

But here comes the great army of the new 
generation, erect and firm-footed yet, with ranks 
unbroken. Shall that, too, be decimated by this 
miserable weakness of compliance, and for want 
of one brave word ? God in heaven forbid it ! 

O friends, learn betimes to say " No ! " when 
you know you ought to say it. Fear not the 
sneers of the evil-disposed, the corrupt, or the 
merely thoughtless, but fear rather the anguish 
and tears of those who love you, the stings of 
your conscience, and the displeasure of your 
God. Be prompt and strong to say " No ! " when 



3 18 Thou shalt say, No. 



you ought, and your better nature bids you, and 
so march on, through your career, in safety, 
honor, and peace. 

And it is not only to the solicitations or the 
suggestions that would lead us in fatal direc- 
tions, into enslaving vices, or blasting crimes, or 
the outright sacrifice of truth, honor, and purity 
that we need to exercise this great prerogative 
of downright refusal. In the thick of this our 
social city life, we have need to exercise it daily, 
and almost hourly, in respect to requests and in- 
vitations that have no bad intent, but are meant 
in courtesy and kindness, and that in other cir- 
cumstances, and at other times, might be com- 
plied with, in all propriety. We need, on moral 
grounds, to guard with some jealousy our per 
sonal independence, and let nobody unduly or 
unseasonably invade it. We cannot afford to 
hold ourselves, our time, faculties, thoughts, or 
even sympathies entirely at the beck and call, 
even of the best people, or of the kindest-mean- 
ing friends. Only one's self can know his own 
exact position on any given day or hour, what he 
has to do, or had better do, what he has to think 
about, or what to engage his feelings, or to oc- 
cupy his energies, or what purpose and aim 
claims him. He must therefore take care of 
himself. He should hold himself ready and firm 
to decline every request, from whomsoever it 
comes, that would use up the hours or the ener- 
gies that he has consecrated to more important 
objects, or that would interfere with a duty or an 



Thou shall say, No. 319 

engagement ; that would divert him from a seri- 
ous aim, or break down a good rule or resolution. 
Also to decline solicitations for favors which 
sound principle forbids him to grant, or which 
in reasonable prudence he cannot grant, and 
which, therefore, no man has a right to expect 
of him. 

But it is so hard to refuse people who ask 
things in kindness or in confidence. Yes, it is 
hard, and therefore it is that I am striving to put 
the duty of it on the highest ground of personal 
independence, and of moral right, and of self- 
respect. I enforce it, because, on account of the 
difficulty of it, it needs enforcing. 

But it is ungracious ; it will give offense and 
alienate friends. No, not often, not seriously, or 
only for a moment, or not persons whose opin- 
ions and feelings are entitled to any regard. 

And here I should remark, that in the every- 
day refusals which we have occasion for, it is not 
necessary nor becoming to use always the abrupt, 
sharp, naked word of our text. There are occa- 
sions on which to use that very word with all the 
emphasis of rebuke, or even of indignation, that 
our lips can give it. But generally there may be 
found terms in which to make a refusal as polite 
and courteous as a consent. And a Christian, 
and a gentleman or lady, will prefer those terms 
when they are fitting. It is not necessary to be 
rude or to insult anybody. 

Now and then a person may be so ill-bred or 
so inconsiderate as to reject your negative, and 



320 Thou shalt say, No. 



importune you, and demand your reasons, and 
insist on an argument. You may bear that 
awhile in silence or courteous evasion ; but you 
may sometimes be brought to a point at which 
your self-respect will put on an air that shall say 
gently, yet unanswerably, " Stand off ; you pre- 
sume too far, you trespass on my personality ; 
you must take for granted my reasons are suf- 
ficient, and leave me to be the sole judge of 
them." 

That high independence which never hesitates 
to say " No ! " whenever and to whomsoever it 
should be said, commands respect. It is a chief 
element of all nobleness and strength of charac- 
ter. It is essential to feminine dignity, and to 
the highest manhood. It makes you worth seek- 
ing, and causes your refusals to be better taken 
than the loose assents of those facile persons 
who from sheer weakness in the fibre and the 
making up of their character can never say "No," 
or say it as if guilty of an offense and fearful of 
your displeasure. 

Such are the functions, and such the sphere of 
the veto-power in the human constitution. We 
must maintain it with vigor at several points, 
maintain it and exercise it against the inordinate 
demands of our own appetites and passions, and 
against the things, events, circumstances, that 
set themselves, as obstacles, temptations, or al- 
lurements, against our just aims, our best aspira- 
tions, and our abiding interests. Exercise it 
towards all persons whatsoever, who, wickedly 



Thou shalt say, No. 321 



or innocently, in malice or in kindness, demand 
or propose or hint to you anything that would 
lead you one step towards the slightest breach 
of your veracity, fidelity, or integrity, or involve 
you in any course or act of deception, or stain 
your purity, or sully your good name, or com- 
mit you to any folly, or lead to the neglect of 
a duty or the breaking of a promise, or a waste 
of time, or an outrage of your best affections, or 
an interruption of any serious purpose in life. 
To all such solicitations be ready with a brave, 
instant, and inflexible " No ! " 

So maintain and strengthen your soul's self- 
sovereignty, from early childhood to latest man- 
hood. So build up the fabric of a manly and 
heroic character, and secure the beauty and felic- 
ity of a well-ordered life. So keep distinct and 
bright the divine image in which you were made, 
secure the franchise of God's kingdom for here 
and for hereafter, and give the world assurance 
of a man. 

1872. 



21 



XXII. 



THE MIRACLE OF CANA. 

And the third day there was a marriage in Cana of Galilee. . . . 
And both Jesus was called, and his disciples, to the marriage. — John 
ii. i, 2. 

IT can never be known what were the literal 
physical and chemical facts underlying this 
little story of the water changed into wine. How 
to reconcile the acknowledged inviolability of the 
natural laws with the singular power or mysteri- 
ous influence ascribed to Jesus in the (so-called) 
miraculous narratives of the New Testament, is 
a question earnestly and ingeniously discussed 
by those persons to whose minds the miracles, as 
such, are vitally connected with the foundations 
of the Christian faith. As I am not of that num- 
ber, I pass the question by now, as usual, as be- 
ing impossible to answer and unprofitable to dis- 
cuss. 

Almost any one, however, of these narratives, 
without our determining how far the mythic ele- 
ment, or how far literal fact prevails in it, pre- 
sents some moral feature that is suggestive of 
spiritual wisdom, sometimes beautiful and pre- 
cious. 



The Miracle of Cana. 323 

We do not know anything about the conflict 
or concord between the chemical laws and the 
spiritual laws, through which, as the story relates, 
the insipid and tasteless water was changed into 
the sparkling and generous liquor which in Script- 
ure phrase, " Maketh glad the heart of man." 
But we do know that there are presences, there 
are influences in the world, possessing a mysteri- 
ous, and, if you will, a miraculousp ower, to trans- 
form things common and homely into things rare 
and beautiful, exalt flatness into exhilaration, 
transmute the dull dross into the shining gold of 
life, turn water into wine. 

We must not scrutinize too closely or press 
too far the contrast, so much insisted on in these 
days, between water and wine, as to the relative 
value and healthfulness of the two, but simply 
fall in with the ancient metaphor, and take one 
as the rhetorical type of what is flat and com- 
mon, and the other as the type of what is costly 
and delicious and vivifying. 

Such transforming and transfiguring influences 
are as numerous and various as the higher fac- 
ulties of the human soul. I suppose such in- 
fluences were never centred in any person on 
earth so largely as in Jesus of Nazareth, and we 
may be sure that his presence there, at the mar 
riage in Cana, whether He furnished wine or not, 
whether He did any noticeable act or not, wrought 
powerfully to change and exalt the scene and 
occasion, brought in a finer exhilaration, and a 
sweeter cheer, infused a deeper if a solemn joy, 



324 The Miracle of Carta. 

and through the consciousness of the bridal pair, 
and of every guest, gave a new significance and 
a holier beauty to the marriage rite, so that it 
was no mere mating of the sexes, no vulgar con- 
tract for worldly convenience, but a mystery, a 
sacrament, and the fairest earthly type of the 
heavenly blessedness. 

It will help us in appreciating this transform- 
ing power of Jesus, to observe how, within our 
constant experience, the same power is exercised 
in a measure by other persons, by the influence 
of gifts and attributes like his in kind but differ- 
ent in degree, or different from his, yet to be 
ranked among the great transforming powers of 
humanity. 

The earth is covered all over with grand and 
beautiful sceneries, which men love to look upon 
and find themselves lifted up, softened, strength- 
ened, soothed, purified, by the healthful and in- 
spiring influences of outward nature. But into 
whatever scenes a profound human interest has 
come, how greatly is the charm deepened, and 
the influence heightened, and that, too, even 
though the scenes in their visible aspects be tame 
and unattractive. 

If there is a spot of earth that is sufficient unto 
itself, and in which the omnipotence of the Cre- 
ator is so conspicuously manifested that the in- 
trusion of a human presence, or the thought of 
anything that man is or can do, must be lost 
sight of as a trivial accident, or an impertinence, 
it is Switzerland, with its awful heights and lovely 



The Miracle of Cctna. 



325 



vales and lakes, the feebleness of man dwindling 
into nothingness amid such majestic presences ; 
and yet the stories of Tell and Winkelried, and 
their companions, of their brave deeds and en- 
durances and sacrifices for liberty and right, add 
a new grandeur and loveliness to what is grand 
or lovely there, bringing a new and touching 
charm, as all travelers know so well. The moral 
attributes of God, even as reflected in the hum- 
blest child that bears his image, add a new and 
finer glory to the most stupendous works of his 
Almighty hand. 

The lake country of England, with its felicitous 
combinations of rugged hill and smiling valley, 
and wood and water, is the delight of its thou- 
sands of pilgrims who stop to nestle awhile in its 
beautiful lap, or only wind along in a single day's 
journey ; yet it was little known, deemed com- 
mon, and was neglected, until men and women 
of high character and intellect made it their 
abode, and the poets, especially Wordsworth, 
threw over it the spell of their genius, invested 
the region with the wonder-working charm of a 
tender human interest, and a lofty spiritual inter- 
est, casting a delicious glamour over the eyes of 
visitors that refines, exalts, idealizes the entire 
scenery. The presence of soul awakening soul, 
and interfusing itself with the aspects of nature, 
has been the wonder-worker here. 

Scotland is a rough, homely country, nothing 
specially grand or lovely in its natural aspects, 
and its people continued rude and semi-barba- 



326 The Miracle of Cana. 

rous longer than their neighbors. A century ago 
it was despised as rude and uninviting by people 
of culture. Few went there who could help it. 
Now it lias become as classic and fascinating as 
any land in Europe. Two men, especially, have 
wrought the change — Burns and Scott. The 
one by his tender yet manly fellow-feeling with 
the poor, the oppressed, the lowly, helping them 
to erect themselves in a courageous and self- 
respecting manhood ; the other by his genial 
sympathy with whatever had been brave, gen- 
erous, chivalrous and charming in the old history 
or the new life of the people. They diffused their 
spiritual presence over the whole land, and peo- 
pled hill and dale, and castle and cottage, wild 
moor and city street, with forms of strong, heroic, 
or beautiful life, historical or imaginary, no mat- 
ter which ; of homely and coarse life often, yet 
healthful, real, intensely human; and such life, 
wherever it is vividly conceived and pictured, has 
a transforming power over nature. And now all 
over the land there are scenes of birth and of 
burial, scenes of bold adventure, of tragic pathos, 
of dire conflict, of religious fortitude, and of fer- 
vid faithful love, that have a strange spell to at- 
tract the traveler's steps, scarcely less than that 
of towering Alps or castled Rhine, or the gal- 
leries of Dresden and Florence. Humanity is 
the mysterious power that over all the face of 
inanimate nature turns the water into wine, to 
the contemplative soul. 

Even narrow, grimy streets and close courts in 



The Miracle of Cana. 327 

London city or Edinburgh old town, when you 
think of the men of intellectual might, or of brave 
and beautiful character, whom you know of in 
history, in biography, who dwelt there once, and 
walked those pavements, and repose in that dust, 
and whose influence has reached even you in a 
far land, and fired your imagination, stirred your 
reverence or love, and touched your life to finer 
issues. Those scenes, though nature has not dis- 
tinguished them, and man may have defiled them, 
become to you almost hallowed ground. 

Sometimes man produces material works that 
seem to surpass himself. When he has reared 
some immense and gorgeous structure, it seems 
as if he, the puny creature, had better retire from 
it and leave it to make its own impression of 
grandeur and beauty upon the spectator's mind, 
of as little consequence, and as little missed, 
as the coral-worm withdrawing from the strong 
island he has built up from the floor of the sea. 
Yet when you have entered a cathedral at Co- 
logne, at Strasburg, or elsewhere, and listened 
to the solemn tones of the great organ, and 
looked aloft and around with awe at the vastness, 
and delight at the beauty, and felt that it is a fit 
temple for the infinite God, you shall find, per- 
haps, that what has touched the deepest place in 
your soul has been the sight of some poor, worn 
old woman, or some simple, hard-working peas- 
ant girl, bowing in fervent, confiding devotion at 
some side-altar, and then rising and taking up 
her staff or basket and going forth again to her 



328 The Miracle of Cana. 

hard lot, in poverty and rags it may be, yet with 
the radiance of a new light from heaven on her 
face and new courage in her weary steps. Hu- 
man faith and piety humbly communing with the 
infinite Father, a more sublime and touching 
spectacle moving you, exalting you more than 
any wonders of art, or any magnificence in wood 
and stone. One humble human soul, tender and 
true, drawn close to its God, and taking hold of 
the powers of the world to come, is a greater 
thing than any temple that is built for it, and 
imparts to that temple itself the chief element of 
its majesty, its beauty, its sanctity. 

Observe that narrow strip of Syrian territory 
along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. 
Nature had set no special seal of favoritism upon 
it, no mark of preference over the land of Moab 
beyond, or of Egypt below. But what a lustre 
there is upon it ! God had been there, and al- 
ways in his strength and beauty, there as every- 
where. He had furrowed out the channel of the 
Jordan, pitched the slopes of Tabor, and carved 
the cliffs of Zion, garnered up his waters in the 
Sea of Galilee, and planted his cedars on the 
sides of Lebanon, his roses in Sharon, and his 
olive-trees in the garden-fields of Judaea, with all 
the abundant tokens of power and love mani- 
fested in the forces of nature. Yet it was but 
common ground, a little unnoticeable patch of 
the earth-wide garden of the Lord. 

But when its Creator had manifested there, in 
an eminent degree, his own higher moral attri- 



The Miracle of Cana. 329 

butes through the great inspired souls that He 
sent upon the scene, especially through that one 
preeminent man, the man of men, the very Son 
of Man, and thereby the Son of God, the spiritual 
lord and king of men, when He had appeared in 
that land, and walked its roads, and sailed upon 
its waters, and passed through its city streets, 
and entered its dwellings, and rested at its way- 
side wells, and uttered his prayers on its lonely 
hill-sides and in its dewy gardens, and lived 
there his spotless and beneficent life, and deliv- 
ered his sweet and lofty messages of truth and 
love, and the divine tenderness and mercy, and 
the immortal hope, and sealed it all with the 
free surrender of his life, then it was no longer 
common ground. Then it became to the heart 
of the world, and in its speech, the Holy Land. 
The very airs that swept over it became, as it 
were, the breath of God's Holy Spirit. The 
sound of divine voices has lingered on its hill-tops 
and along its valleys. It became what prophet 
and psalmist, with a patriot's partial, boastful 
love, had called it long before, "A land, the 
glory of all lands, beautiful for situation, the joy 
of the whole earth." Myriads of pilgrim feet 
have hurried toilsomely across Europe to press 
that sacred soil and look upon the spots that had 
known that presence. And in the uttermost 
parts of the earth, devout and loyal souls have 
almost literally, like Daniel in his captivity at 
Babylon, kneeled for their daily prayers at the 
windows of their chambers that faced towards 



330 The Miracle of Cana. 



Jerusalem. Verily the little wonder wrought at 
the marriage in Cana is but a poor, faint type, 
though a beautiful one, of the transforming and 
transfiguring influence of a great and beautiful 
personality. 

And for all those, in countless numbers, through 
the Christian centuries, who might not look upon 
the scenes which his bodily presence had hal- 
lowed, nor even picture them, nor visit them in 
imagination, but who yet have found that He 
comes hither to them as He promised, and be- 
comes a spiritual presence to them wherever they 
dwell, and they seem to catch the look of sympa- 
thy in his benignant face, to feel his hand taking 
their hands, to lead and uphold them, and to 
hear his words and tones, full of heavenly pity 
and forgiveness, words telling of the Father's 
love and the heavenly mansions, words of glori- 
ous truth and kindly warning love and dear en- 
couragement and comfort, proclaiming the soul's 
victory over sin and death and the grave, and 
the kingdom of heaven coming, and come, — they, 
the countless throng of his trusting and affection- 
ate disciples, have found a new heaven and a 
new earth, wherever that mystic presence comes. 
It lights up the landscape of their life with a 
glory from a higher source than the sun, clothes 
it with a beauty that is not in it, but in the inner 
eye that looks upon it, and in the Father's smile 
that invests it, infuses new zest into their pleas- 
ures, a strange new soothing into their pains and 
griefs, reveals a- look of brotherhood in all human 



The Miracle of Cana. 331 

faces, makes the hand-grasp of friendship more 
cordial, and the glance of love warmer and ho- 
lier, sets the song of triumph on dying lips, and 
adorns the very grave with flowers. 

And not only He, the chief transmuter, as be- 
ing the grandest presence, the largest, sweetest, 
divinest soul, but also all those among men and 
women who have lived in his light and shared 
his Spirit, whencesoever they consciously or un- 
consciously derived it, they also in their degree 
change and glorify the scenes and circles in 
which they move. Good men and women, such 
as we all have known, perhaps, in the nearest re- 
lationships, the blameless and self-governed, the 
upright and faithful and true, affectionate and 
kindly, sages without the pretension, and saints 
without the title, our own best beloved and re- 
vered ones, it may be, when they are gone, — and 
alas, we hardly ever see them most truly and in 
full light till they are gone, — when they are gone 
we notice how the streets and paths that wit- 
nessed their daily walk have taken on a new as- 
pect from their presence ; how their presence still 
hovers over the fields they tilled and the gardens 
they trimmed ; how their image, reverend or beau- 
tiful, - lingers and brightens in the house, the 
room, the chair they most occupied ; how their 
voices are heard there and their words remem- 
bered • the perishable things wrought by their 
hands become sacred relics ; the books worn by 
their reading are full of meanings that their au- 
thors never put into them. The aroma of what 



332 The Mi7*acls of Cana. 



was sweet and pure in their spirit, or of what was 
manly and noble in their lives, is diffused all 
over the things they handled and the places they 
frequented • their death becomes a spiritual coro- 
nation scene, and their tombs consecrated shrines 
at which to bow down in tender recollection, in 
meditation and prayer. It is such as these that 
redeem for us the baldness and material hardness 
of the earthly lot, exalt things common, refine 
things coarse, and at the varied banquet of life 
sweeten the daily bread and turn the water into 
wine. 

But without reference to persons or personali- 
ties we may say, in the most general terms, 
that wherever the spirit and temper of Jesus 
Christ, the most truly human, and therefore the 
most divine, finds a place among men, it changes 
and renews the aspect, the significance, and the 
capabilities of the world, especially his chief 
characteristic — love. Love is the great miracle- 
worker in this world. Love brings down fire 
from heaven, to put light and warmth and joy 
into this cold climate of our earthiness and arc- 
tic selfishness. Love weaves threads of gold into 
the dullest web of earthly life, and makes it shine 
as though woven in heavenly looms. It draws 
and knits heart to heart in that disinterestedness 
and self-oblivion which is holier and diviner than 
it knows. It consecrates the marriage bond, 
transfigures the poorest dwelling — be it a cave in 
the rocks or a lodge in the wilderness — into a 
very palace for the soul, carpeting its cold floors 



The Miracle of Cana. 333 



and upholstering its bare walls with sanctities 
and sweetnesses and contentments of an affec- 
tionate and peaceful home life. It sets the bald- 
est prose of life to sweetest melody, and makes 
every man and woman and child a true poet in 
heart, though they be none with the pen. Love 
lightens all burdens, smooths all roughnesses, 
makes hardship easy, and converts labor into play. 
It hangs the inner chambers of imagery with 
pictures and visions of the absent, and dear and 
sacred memories of the dead. It brings a suf- 
ficient sunshine into the condition which no 
worldly prosperity brightens ; and, looking up into 
the heavenly Father's face, beholds there, in the 
light of its own exceeding beauty and joy, the 
expression of an infinite tenderness and affection, 
and learns to give back love for love, in filial 
submission, obedience, and trust. 

I have thus tried to bring to view those rich 
experiences of life which are typified by the 
miracle of Cana. 

And now, friends, let us seek to have this beau- 
tiful miracle wrought for us and in us, all along 
our life journey. Who or what shall provide for 
us the mystic wine to gladden our life-feast, and 
transmute to our hands, and transfigure for our 
eyes, this hard material world and make it . a 
soul's world, soft to our tread, and bright with the 
spiritual radiance ? What persons of the dead 
or the living, what circumstances, what power, 
shall work for us this so wonderful yet so com- 
mon miracle, the miracle that repeats itself and 



334 The Miracle of Cana. 

renews itself every day, all over the world ? Let 
us think who, or what, or where, and go seek it 
more diligently than gold, and hold it more pre- 
cious than rubies. Wherever that stream flows 
from beneath the throne of God, let us go bathe 
in it day by day. Wherever for us that sunshine 
streams out of heaven, let us go bask in it. 
Wherever that power is exercised, let us go sit 
all day within the sweep of its transforming in- 
fluence. 

And if, by any gift or grace of God, or any 
visitings of the Holy Spirit, we might become 
partakers of that wonder-working power; if we 
might be such, and so live as to make the world 
more beautiful and happy for some that live in it 
with us, put some sweetness here and there into 
a bitter cup, lead some footsteps in paths that 
shine with the beauty of holiness, send some 
sunshine into the dark places, make it to some a 
dear boon and an abiding joy that we and they 
have had our walk together here ; if we can so, 
in any manner, help to transfigure the world for 
one another, — oh, that is the Christ-like life and 
influence that repeats and infinitely transcends 
the miracle of Gana ! That is the highest func- 
tion and the sweetest fruit of existence. That 
is . the ministry of angels, and a working together 
with God. 



1872. 



APPENDIX, 



CONTAINING 

INTRODUCTORY I. and II., 

TWO SERMONS PREACHED AT THE FIRST CHURCH IN ROXBURY ON 
THE MORNING AND AFTERNOON OF JULY II, 1830, 
THE FIRST SUNDAY AFTER THE 
PREACHER'S ORDINATION, 

AND THE 

ORDAINING ADDRESS 

DELIVERED AT THE 

ORDINATION OF THE REV. JOHN GRAHAM BROOKS, 
AS COLLEAGUE OF THE PREACHER, 

Sunday, October 10, i8yj. 



APPENDIX. 



INTRODUCTORY I. 

Feed the flock of God. — i Peter v. 2 

IN coming before you, my hearers, for the first time 
in this new relation, I feel that I need not ask 
your forbearance if I depart somewhat from the ordi- 
nary range of the topics of the pulpit. I cannot speak 
to-day of other subjects than those which have been 
lately engrossing and directing my every thought and 
emotion. 

The peculiarity of the occasion and the authority 
of custom must excuse me if I am very personal and 
say much of myself, — the feelings and thoughts, the 
hopes and fears and purposes, that come thronging 
into this passing era, — that must be of some interest 
to you, and are of all-absorbing interest and impor- 
tance to me. The fervent prayer, the solemn charge, 
the fraternal welcome, have been here offered, and 
are passed. Duties, responsibilities, have become 
realities, and fill the mind with mingled anticipations 
and fix it upon the future. 

Of these duties I would now speak with simplicity 
and directness, that I may both fill my own mind with 
a clear and deep sense of them, and give you my 
views of the relation that has begun between us, and 
of its mutual obligations. 



338 Appendix. 



And first, the public duties of the pulpit. 

It is the fortune of those who enter this profession 
at this day to have fallen upon times when the pro- 
fessional standard is very high around them. Many 
who occupy our holy places are ornaments and shin- 
ing lights, not only of the church, but of the coun- 
try and the world. The pulpit has been growing 
in respectability, eloquence, and effectiveness ; our 
churches have been thronged as no other places are ; 
accordingly the standard is raised high, and is ris- 
ing. Heavy and growing claims are laid upon the 
clergy. The wise, the cultivated, the intellectual, 
encouraged by these examples around them of what 
the pulpit may do, are beginning to look to it for in- 
struction and incitement, and to think that it does 
not fully accomplish its legitimate purposes if it fail 
and come short of this. 

This state of things calls for a corresponding power 
and exertion on the part of the clergy to meet the 
demand. Stores of learning, a fund of thought, de- 
voted and untiring industry are required, and he who 
has them not, and is not in a way to acquire them, is 
behind his time ; he has mistaken his place and call- 
ing, — he is not wanted. If he does not task every 
faculty, and stretch every nerve, and fill up life with 
labor, he very soon finds himself behindhand in the 
race; his brethren and the world have got before 
him, and he is forsaken and forgotten. 

Do not suppose that I have been preparing the 
way for the very common and very disagreeable round 
of complaints and lamentations about the. labors and 
difficulties of the profession. I am not going to of- 
fend your understanding and sense of propriety by 
setting forth and magnifying the peculiar difficulties 
of my calling, by recounting its sacrifices and trials, 



Introductory I. 339 

9 

and taxing your sympathies in their behalf. I know 
not how this came to be the peculiar weakness of the 
clergy. 

The intellectual industry and standing and progress 
demanded of the clergy, in this age and in this re- 
gion, I regard as the glory of the profession, and I 
rejoice in them. I rejoice soberly and anxiously, but 
deeply and sincerely. To be required by circum- 
stances to labor hard in an elevated cause for noble 
objects is a privilege and a blessing. It is an incite- 
ment to move a man to live and act as becomes his 
nature and faculties and accountableness. Men sel- 
dom do much more than they are required by some 
circumstances of their condition to do, and he for 
whom the circumstances are strong and pressing is 
therein blest above the ordinary lot. 

He who owes many and high duties to others, and 
performs them faithfully, and so does good to others, 
does a greater good to himself ; and that is a happy 
profession that is filled with such duties and is hedged 
about with a strong necessity to perform them. That 
is an unfortunate man who has no pressing induce- 
ment to live other than a life of worthless ease. That 
is an unhappy situation which permits one to rust out 
his powers in sloth and indifference. I pity him, 
whatever his employment, who does not find some- 
thing in it to urge him to do with all his might what 
his hands find to do. 

A minister of the gospel, in these times, has no 
right to be idle and negligent, and he ought not to be 
suffered to be so. He has no right to pass off the 
dull, desultory, and commonplace production of an 
indolent hour when the faithful labor of a week is 
needed and called for, and he ought not to be suffered 
to do so. He has no right so to spend his time, and 



34Q 



Appendix. 



employ his faculties, and exercise his function, that 
year after year shall go by and he remain intellectu- 
ally stationary, unimproved and unimproving, and he 
ought not to be suffered to do so. 

Such is my view of ministerial duty, as respects the 
pulpit, and I care not how far I commit myself on 
this point. I care not how high I place the standard 
of duty, or how publicly I do it, or how long my words 
are remembered. 

Do not think I say this presumptuously, as if no in- 
dulgence were needed or asked for. Very far from it. 
Much indulgence is needed, constantly, kindly, and 
most charitably. You cannot expect in the young the 
intellectual fruits of age ; you cannot expect to see in 
all the rare powers of the few great ones ; you can- 
not forbid all relaxation ; you cannot expect the same 
things in sickness and in health ; you cannot expect 
that the regular weekly productions of your minister 
shall bear comparison with the one or two choice ones 
picked from a thousand, which the stranger brings to 
you ; you cannot expect more than one duty to be 
done at a time. These things you cannot require. 
But you may and oughjt to demand reasonable evi- 
dence of constant industry, faithful effort, and devot- 
edness. This you may justly require, and so far and 
so long as I am concerned, for the sake of my own 
self-improvement and self-satisfaction and true hap- 
piness, I hope you always will require it and rigidly 
insist upon it. 

I know that I have been stating and justifying prin- 
ciples that, if strictly followed, would make the cleri- 
cal office a very perilous one, — not to be lightly un- 
dertaken or easily discharged. But that soldier is 
not fit for the field who sees nothing inviting in the 
foremost post of peril, and he is no fit soldier of the 



Introductory I. 



34 1 



cross who covets a light armor and an easy service, 
who looks repiningly on hardship and shrinks from 
hazardous responsibilities. 

But while I state what I think advantageous and 
happy in the present general state of public taste and 
requisition with regard to the pulpit, I ought not to 
forget or pass by the dangers which attend such a 
state of things. These are many and fearful, — and 
some among us are beginning to anticipate and la- 
ment their symptoms and approach. 

There is danger that sermons shall become ora- 
tions, the preacher a pageant and an exhibition, the 
gospel a mere text and motto-book. There is danger 
that liberality in religion shall become licentiousness. 
The popular mind grows fastidious, the popular ear 
grows delicate, and religion is almost too rude for it. 
This vice must not be spoken ill of, because it is 
fashionable, and grows out of the state of society ; 
that gross sin must not be condemned, because there 
are some about who have been suspected of it ; some 
virtues must not be much insisted on, because the 
place is not very remarkable for that virtue. The 
preacher must not be over-earnest in the cause of 
religion, lest he seem to be too orthodox ; and some 
truths must not be too much urged, because they 
have grown homely and old-fashioned and tame. 

There is danger that the strong and solemn words 
of truth and soberness be sacrificed to graces of style 
and newness and richness of imagery. There is dan- 
ger that the fervors of a holy religion be quenched in 
the cold dews of Castalia, and the inspiration of the 
Muses, instead of the Spirit of God, be invoked on 
the minister of the gospel and the altar of the sanct- 
uary, and so the pulpit shut out its Master with the 
oracles of false gods, — the pulpit, that should be the 



34 2 Appendix. 



unbiased expounder of the Christian faith, the fear- 
less and unyielding champion of an unqualified purity, 
a fervent piety, and a lofty, uncompromising morality, 
— yield the liberty of Christ, bend and truckle to the 
changes of fashion, and cater to public taste ; such 
are some of the dangers of the times. There is an 
alarming tendency in the community to fall into them, 
and the clergy are but too ready to follow. We have 
an undoubted right to change the church into a play- 
house or place of declamation ; but call it no longer 
the temple of the Most High, the sanctuary, the gate 
of heaven ; mingle not the sacredness of prayer with 
its exhibitions, call not its ministers the ministers of 
Jesus of Nazareth, call not the Sabbath the Sabbath- 
of the Lord. 

I do not make these remarks to justify a barren, 
narrow, exclusive sort of preaching, as if there must 
be no images or allusions or trains of thought that 
cannot be borrowed from the Bible. That is a 
bigoted and indolent reverence for the Bible which 
leaves no liberty to the powers and resources of the 
mind. The waters of pure religion, that flow forth 
from the throne of God to enrich and beautify and 
sanctify the world, come in no single channel. The 
Bible, the revelation of Christ, is one and a most full 
and glorious one, but not the only one. Nature, the 
holy works of God, the earth and the heavens, with 
all that is beautiful and grand, gentle and solemn, in 
them ; history, with its instructions and warnings and 
encouragements ; Providence, with its awakenings and 
directings ; the pure, spontaneous sentiments of our 
own bosoms, — all these, equally divine and heavenly, 
lend their streams to quicken and nurture within us 
a spirit that makes us religious and leads us to God 
and felicity. 



Introductory I. 343 



Let him, then, who would be a faithful and effective 
minister of religion, as far as in him lies, seek power 
and beauty and interest from all the sources that God 
has opened to the eye of a free mind, — from the 
heavens and the earth, from within, from the past, 
the passing, and the future, — only let the gospel of 
Christ, with the spirit that breathes and the truth that 
speaks from its pages, overshadow and possess him, 
and be to him as an ark of the Lord, to guide and 
concentrate and hallow the whole. 

Perhaps, in assuming a share of the responsibili- 
ties of this pulpit, I may be expected to declare more 
particularly my intentions as to the manner of dis- 
charging those responsibilities. 

In the first place, this is an age of sects. The lines 
are drawn with definiteness. Christians take sides, 
and know their men and their standard. Parties are 
divided off and fenced in, organized and counted to a 
decimal. Whether this state of things is a desirable 
and happy one I will not now undertake to decide. 
It would be idle to do so. But it does exist. It is 
matter of fact, and likely to continue so. And while 
this state of things exists, — and indeed I believe in 
any state of things, — a society has a right to know, 
so far as it desires to know, the tone of theology and 
the leading opinions of its minister, and he ought not 
to conceal or withhold them whenever an expression 
of them seems to be called for or needed. 

If asked what course I expect to pursue with re- 
spect to parties and doctrines, I can say but little 
more in reply than to assert my own absolute and 
unqualified personal independence. 

I come from an institution which I love and ven- 
erate as the hallowed abode of free minds and untram- 



344 



Appendix. 



ineled opinion, where no creeds are imposed and no 
doctrinal pledges are offered or asked for or tolerated. 
I am yet linked with no sect, responsible for none of 
their opinions and measures. My opinions, such as 
they are, or such as they may hereafter be, I hold 
myself ready whenever occasion may demand it to 
assert, and, so far as I am able, to defend and main- 
tain. I am responsible to no party for them, and no 
party is responsible for the doctrines which I may 
hold. I am free to qualify or change or renounce 
them, but all in my own single name. 

Neither am I answerable to you for my opinions, 
and I am sure you would not have it so. Neither 
are any of you answerable to me, and I would not 
have it so. This much only can be said : If ever 
my preaching shall seem to be either heresy or su- 
perstition to you, and shall thus become unaccep- 
table and unprofitable, the course is very plain, — the 
connection does not answer the purposes of such a 
connection, and should be dissolved, and that at 
once and of course, without results of councils or ad- 
judications of courts. 

I shall associate with my brethren on the principles 
on which all men and all animate beings associate, 
with those with whom I have most sympathy in sen- 
timent and feeling ; and if such association puts a 
party name upon me, be it Unitarian or Socinian or 
Liberal, I am willing to take it and bear it with its 
honor and its odium. 

But with any sect, as such, banded and herded to- 
gether, and bound all to cooperate in the schemes 
and doings of the body politic, for right and for 
wrong, for better and for worse, — such sects there 
are, and with them, as such, I desire no communion. 
They abridge individual freedom, and are unworthy 



Introductory I 



345 



of Christianity, and false to its spirit, and fatal to its 
ends. 

I see no objection to names and titles by which to 
distinguish those who differ from each other in their 
views of Christianity, any more than those who differ 
in politics or philosophy, or anything about which 
honest men disagree. It is the right use and natural 
application of words. I see nothing shocking or un- 
christian in using or assuming such names, and it is 
idle to think of abolishing them. Only let every indi- 
vidual keep sacred his individual freedom, and not 
regard himself as responsible for and obliged to main- 
tain all the opinions and doings of those who bear the 
same general appellation, and that appellation will do 
no harm. Parties there are, and must be, in every- 
thing and about everything on which men's minds 
act freely and decide for themselves, and I am not 
surprised or disgusted or grieved to find them in 
religion, designated by their convenient distinctive 
names. I see the dangers of them, but I see also 
the necessity of them, — how they spring from the 
nature of things and the condition of man. If there 
be a sect in Christendom, — no, I will not call it a 
sect, for that name has become unpopular and hate- 
ful, — if there be a class or body of men drawn to- 
gether and held together by the unbiased sympathies 
and broad charities of free and honest minds and 
hearts, loving and seeking the truth, praying and striv- 
ing together for its fruits, all cheering and helping 
each other without restraint or denunciation or calling 
to account, — if there be such a party in Christendom, 
I pray God to make me a worthy member of it. But 
a party so perfect I suppose there is not. And yet if 
there be one that professes to make these principles 
its standard, and seems to be laboring and hoping to 



346 



Appendix. 



arrive at such a standard, and is likely to do so, and 
thus to become the possessor and promoter of the 
glorious liberty of the gospel, — if there be such a 
party, then I desire to be one of it, and if it have a 
name, I am ready to take its name. 

To whatever party or association of men I may ever 
be drawn by sympathy and inclination or a sense of 
duty, — and I hope this matter may be intrusted to my 
own judgment and taste only, — let it be understood 
I am not to sound its trumpet and fight its battles 
in this place. I abhor controversy in the pulpit. Ex- 
cept in extreme cases it should not be entered upon 
or tolerated to the slightest degree. Its harsh tones 
shall never fill and profane this house, so long and so 
far as its services are under my influence and control. 
Christianity, its spirit and purport, should indeed be 
understood by all who profess it. Its truth may and 
should be set forth and illustrated, and this, if done 
at all, must of course be done according to the views 
of the preacher. But those views should never be set 
forth and maintained as the appointed and approved 
system of any sect, or as opposed to and conflicting 
with the doctrines of any other sect. I rejoice and 
am thankful that there seems to be here no shadow 
of necessity or taste for a disputatious or dogmatical 
sort of preaching. 

It would be idle and ill-timed to lay down any plan 
that I intend to pursue with respect to the public serv- 
ices of this place. I have, of course, some present 
thoughts and intentions upon the subject, but how can 
I know but they may be changed in a week ? All plans 
formed to walk by in future untried scenes are but 
dreams. The traveler, when he starts, may antici- 
pate in fancy all the journey that is before him, but 
how soon do the new scenery, the new difficulties and 



Introductory I. 



347 



pleasures and companions of the way, change again 
and again his feelings and thoughts till he forgets 
those with which he set out. 

I have said what I had to say of the public services 
of the profession; perhaps I should say something 
here of the corresponding obligations of a people. I 
mean the duty of attending upon those services. On 
this subject I have not much to say now, and I do not 
believe I ever shall have. My present views I would 
now give plainly and once for all. I think the people 
of this community are under strong and solemn obli- 
gations to attend public worship, habitually and upon 
principle. But let me not be misunderstood ; I would 
put this obligation upon its true and right ground and 
confine it to that. 

In the first place it should not be put on the ground 
that it is a reciprocal duty owed to the minister per- 
sonally. The minister personally is not entitled to 
any better attendance and attention than he can com- 
mand by the interest and value of his services. If 
he fail to give pleasure or profit it is his own fault or 
his misfortune, and it is no more right in his case than 
in that of other men that the people should be re- 
quired to surfer for it. In whatever degree he fails 
to interest his people, in that same degree they are 
at liberty, so far as he is concerned, to neglect his 
services. This is an age when no class of men can 
command notice and regard on any other ground than 
their. merit. It must indeed be most disheartening, 
withering, to be thus forsaken : the excitement of the 
profession must be lost, the labors of the study and 
the pulpit become a miserable and forced drudg- 
ery, — the heartless fulfillment of a contract, a hard 
dull service done for wages, — but still he cannot com- 
plain. He is on the same footing with the rest of the 



348 



Appendix. 



world. He is treated according to the universal law 
of human desert and reward. He has either mistaken 
his calling or been unfaithful to it, and in either case 
his sorrows and his consolations must be silent — 
with himself and his God. A people may have in- 
dulgent feelings towards him and be influenced by 
them, and therein act generously and amiably, but 
it can hardly be called a ground of duty. 

But I have taken the obligation from this ground 
that I may put it on another, a firmer and less fluctu- 
ating one. You do not owe it to your minister. No, 
the obligation is infinitely broader and deeper and 
stronger ; you owe it to the community as benevolent 
men and good citizens ; you owe it to your children 
as wise and faithful parents ; you owe it to all the 
generations that shall succeed you. 

It seems to be well determined by the original ap- 
pointment of God, by the physical constitution of 
man, and by long and general usage, that one day in 
seven of rest from labor is needful and proper, and it 
does not appear likely that this day of rest will ever 
be given up as such. Now this being the case, Chris- 
tianity asks that this day be given to her and her in- 
stitutions. She desires to hallow its rest by her own 
spirit of calm and holy repose, and in much of the 
world she has done so, but nowhere else so much as 
in New England, and I ask if in doing so she has not 
done infinite good to New England ? I believe that 
but for the institutions of religion this weekly day of 
rest would be a most dangerous day, fatal to public 
morals and peace, — a weekly returning evil, given 
up to indolence and of course to folly, dissipation, 
riot, and crime. But Christianity, under the pious 
guardianship of our fathers, has sanctified the day 
and made it one of holy peace and serenity : by the 



Introductory I. 



349 



power of fashion and habit she has brought to her 
own temple and filled with her own meditations thou- 
sands and tens of thousands for whom every Sabbath 
would otherwise have been not a Sabbath to the 
Lord, but a step of fearful progress in ways of folly 
and vice. I believe I do not exaggerate. I am sure 
that the public services of the Sabbath, unimportant 
as many may think them, are one of the leading and 
effective causes of the comparatively high moral char- 
acter which New England has always sustained. 
They have preserved the Sabbath and made it a 
blessing, and so saved the community from infinite 
degradation. This is matter of fact and calculation. 
The politician and the man of practical thought may 
estimate it, and see it as well as the theologian ; you 
may look back and you see it — look abroad and you 
feel it. 

Thus much has the observance of this day effected 
hitherto ; and now the Sabbath, with its dangers and 
hopes and all its influences for good and for evil, — 
the Sabbath so far as it concerns our own community 
and our children, — has passed into our hands. We 
may cherish and increase its sacredness, or by our 
neglect we may lessen and destroy it. The influence 
of every individual is great in this respect, not only 
on those about him, but especially on those who shall 
come after him, who will reverence his good example 
or justify themselves by his bad one. 

The" power of habit and fashion are incalculably 
great. According to the turn which you give to these, 
your houses of worship will be filled or forsaken by 
the next generation. As you by your example and 
precept may direct, your children and your children's 
children shall, from week to week, come and worship 
here in soberness, or else be abroad in the ways and 



350 



Appendix. 



the haunts which you know are full of dangers. I 
would ask every thinking man if it is not so : and if, 
as a citizen, a neighbor, a father, or as sustaining any 
relation that gives him any influence over the mind 
or morals of any human being, he does not feel a 
great and solemn responsibility in this respect upon 
him. This is the ground on which I put the duty of 
attending public worship. I urge it, not as a matter 
of inexplicable authority, not as a matter of feeling 
to the minister, but as a most excellent and useful 
institution linked vitally with the best interests of 
this community ; a strong guardian of the public mor- 
als ; the expounder and remembrancer of religious 
truths that God gave to us in mercy. In the name, 
then, of true and pure religion, in the name of good 
order and good morals, in behalf of your children 
and their children, as Christians and good citizens 
and good parents, I commend that duty to your de- 
liberate consideration, and I fear not to leave the de- 
cision to fair and sober-minded men. 

Finally, brethren, so long as we shall meet together 
here to worship God, may it be in mutual charity and 
Christian love. May our minds be instructed and 
edified ; may our hearts be warmed with a holy 
spirit, and set more and more on things heavenly 
and eternal. May not our preaching be vain ; may 
not your faith be vain ; but all endeavoring together 
to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace, 
may we all come in the unity of the faith and of the 
knowledge of the Son of God unto the measure of 
the stature of the fullness of Christ. 

There are other more private duties of the pastoral 
relation, too important and interesting to pass unno- 
ticed on this occasion, but they must be deferred to 
the afternoon. 



INTRODUCTORY II. 



Meditate upon these things ; give thyself wholly to them ; that thy 
profiting may appear to all. — i Tim. iv. 15. 

I HAVE spoken of some of the public duties of 
the pastoral relation. I must again crave your 
indulgence towards the personality, it may be ego- 
tism, which on this occasion I know not how to avoid. 
There are other duties of a more private and humble 
nature, quietly performed and little noticed, but which 
involve little less responsibility, and are attended with 
little less labor and anxiety and satisfaction. The 
work of the minister is but half done when he has led 
the devotions of the temple and dispensed its public 
instructions. He does injustice to his office who limits 
its influence and benefits to the pulpit. The Christian 
religion presents so many varied aspects, bears in so 
many points upon human life and character, and is 
fitted 'to touch and move in such infinite variety and 
extent of influence the keys of the heart and the fac- 
ulties of the mind, — that the pulpit, the place of pub- 
lic harangue, with all its legitimate freedom and di- 
rectness, cannot compass it. Christianity cannot be 
all preached. Its truths, its duties, its sanctions and 
admonitions may all be declared in the public assem- 
bly, but its spirit cannot all be imparted or felt there. 
Oh, no. It must go and sit at the side of the sick, 
and in its still voice teach its beautiful lessons of pa- 
tience and trust. It must go in the last hour and 



352 



Appendix. 



lend its heavenly peace and brighten the faith and 
the hopes of the dying. It must go to the lone home 
of the mourner and help his vision to discern a Fa- 
ther's hand of mercy and love figured forth in the 
dark cloud that is passing over his dwelling. It must 
draw the child to its arms and breathe its guiding 
spirit into his trusting ear, and make him love, with 
his young, confiding heart, what is holy and good. 
It must go to the abode of want and distress, and 
there, in the scene of it, teach the bowed down and 
desponding submission and confidence and hope 
towards God. These are the private errands, the un- 
seen and unreported doings of our holy religion. 
They are accomplished in the still scenes and famil- 
iar intercourse of our homes ; the worship and in- 
struction of the Sabbath does not reach them ; these 
are too distant, too general, too formal. I would not 
undervalue social public worship. I sincerely believe 
that it is essential to the preservation of Christianity 
among us, and essential to the well-being of this com- 
munity. But it is not all. With the ancient Hebrews 
there was no place where the offering might ascend 
acceptably, and holy hands be lifted up to God, but 
the tabernacle, where the ark was set up. This was 
a wise appointment ; for the people were ever in- 
clined to idolatry, and, if left to worship where and 
how they pleased, would speedily have raised up false 
gods to themselves. But now we know but one God, 
the Father. The acceptable offering is the silent as- 
pirations of a devout and faithful heart, and whereso- 
ever these burn and ascend, there is a holy place, — ■ 
the Christian's Zion, — and there the Spirit of the 
Lord cometh down. This consecrated altar is not the 
only one, I trust, where our religion reveals her spirit, 
and warms and quickens ours, and lifts us to God in 



Introductory II 



353 



holy thoughts and holy offices. Oh, there are holier 
places than the church, — places hallowed by the mov- 
ing events of Providence, hallowed by the sacred re- 
lations of life, hallowed by the endearments and sym- 
pathies, the joys and sorrows, of our homes. Our 
religion does not set up its public spectacle to be 
gazed at for a little hour, and then left and forgotten 
as if it could do no more for us. She comes here 
to utter her truths and sanctions, to show us her ways 
and whither they lead ; she does this to make her- 
self known, to command our convictions and move 
our affections ; and then she desires to go forth with « 
us to our homes and be a companion, a helper, a 
guide to our spirits. There she would give her color- 
ing to the events that befall us ; she would give her 
tone to the feelings that come up within us ; she 
would stay with us and keep us from all evil, from 
sin, disquietude, and despondence : she would give 
us all that is good, — purity and uprightness of life, 
holiness, hope, felicity. She would call to her aid 
all the dealings of God, and so sanctify and bless 
them that all shall work together for good and for 
joy ; she would mingle herself with the tender and 
amiable affections of home ; she consecrates with 
her mild sanctity the loves of parent and child, hus- 
band and wife, brother and sister, and all attached 
and kindred hearts, taking part in these, not to mar 
them with gloomy, unwelcome restraints, but to hal- 
low and bless them, and make them forever sure and 
joyful. Religion would brighten and sweeten the 
scenes of home, by teaching and helping all eyes to 
wait upon and all hearts to commune with the Father 
that is with us all and loveth us and giveth- us all 
good. She would make us feel his nearness and 
care, and rejoice and trust in them. She would ;;ive 
2 3 



354 Appendix. 



us the piety and trust which gild the joys and soothe 
and sweeten the sorrows of our condition. She 
teaches us to repose confidently on Him who loveth 
and blesseth us alike in giving and in taking away. 

Oh, say not, think not, that religion is the business, 
perhaps the drudgery, of one day, the Sabbath, to be 
left off with its dress and to cease with its rest. Re- 
ligion is not the business of any place or time, but a 
companion, guide, and supporter in all. The quiet of 
our homes seems her favorite element. With a good 
and happy home her spirit seems best to accord. Its 
affections and duties and joys are all religious affec- 
tions, religious duties, and religious joys. There the 
spirit of our religion (its true spirit understood and 
cherished) seems to be made for and linked with and 
necessary to our spirits ; it is our spirits' life and 
healthful enjoyment and action. The well-ordered, 
well-educated, peaceful, and happy family. is and must 
needs be, so far, a religious family. The mother 
must have filled her infants' breasts with good impres- 
sions and nurtured them into right and holy affections, 
and these are religious. The father must have la- 
bored to inspire them with right and strong princi- 
ples, — integrity, industry, a love of duty, and purity 
of life, — and these are religious. Father and mother 
and children must be united, each with the other, and 
with all, in an affectionate and improving social har- 
mony, and that is religious. And then affliction and 
sorrow must come. Death must come, and the circle 
be broken. Then the virtues of the dead, the sym- 
pathy of the living, the hope of reunion where change 
and chance come not, will give consolation, and this 
is religious consolation. 

My friends, if you would know the meaning and 
worth of religion, seek it at home, cherish it there, 



Introductory II. 355 

use, enjoy, strengthen it there ; seek not the influ- 
ences, the impressions, the warnings, joys, consola- 
tions of religion from the pulpit alone, but even more 
from the events of your homes, from the blessings 
and afflictions, the pleasures and griefs, of home. 
These, if we will listen, these speak more effectually 
than the voice of man, — they are the speech and ap- 
peal of God and his angels. Let religion then come 
and abide in your houses, by your firesides and your 
altars ; let her bring and keep alive charity, forgive- 
ness, kindness, and forbearance ; let her reign there, 
and she herself shall thrive amidst your household 
affections, and in return shall overshadow and pos- 
sess your souls, and win you to herself, and give you 
peace and hope and blessedness forever. 

It might seem that these domestic claims and in- 
fluences of religion needed no help, and allowed of 
no participation, and should be sacred from all intru- 
sion from abroad. And yet custom, his situation, 
and the nature of his office, permit and invite one 
individual to a nearer communion with all. The min- 
ister of religion is permitted to be its prompter and 
advocate in all scenes and circumstances. If he be 
worthy and faithful, and have a heart warm with the 
spirit and eager for the service of his Master, he 
is received with willingness and kindness to the 
homes and confidence of those to whom he minis- 
ters. He is permitted to know and to sympathize 
with -their sorrows, and to try to soothe them and 
make them profitable. He is permitted to know their 
moral wants and infirmities, and wherein he may be 
able to lend aid and strength. He is admitted with- 
out distance and restraint to the social intercourse of 
their firesides, to be glad with them and to be the 
helper of their joy. With him there is no conflict of 



356 Appendix. 



interests, no rivalries, no jealousies. Their true in- 
terests and happiness cannot be opposed to his. His 
people are his fathers and mothers,- brothers, sisters, 
and children, and all these intimacies and relations, 
which would otherwise be an anomaly in our state of 
society, are justified and sanctioned by the spirit and 
requirements of the religion to whose service he is 
devoted. Such are the privileges that attach to the 
sacred office ; and now, my brethren, having received 
that office among you, it is my first desire and prayer 
to become worthy of and fitted for those privileges, 
and then to receive them freely and confidingly at 
your hands. Emboldened by the nature of my office, 
desirous to do its duties and receive its satisfactions, 
I ask your friendly reception and confidence in all 
your vicissitudes, whether joyous or grievous. When 
sickness shall come upon any of your number, and 
the world shall seem to be fading away, and death 
and the unseen future seem near, I desire to be ad- 
mitted to his chamber, and if religion, by its prayers, 
its promises, its hopes and supports, can do good, as 
its minister I desire to speak, and if this need not be, 
I ask at least to be one of trie friends who stand round 
him in silence, and commend him to God. 

When the season of bereavement cometh, and your 
houses seem to you desolate, and hope almost dieth, 
and the earth is darkened and joyless, — in that hour 
of deep grief that cometh sooner or later to all, — if 
the words of the risen Saviour, the hopes full of im- 
mortality and joy which He held out, if his example, 
his promises, his Spirit speaking peace, full of deep, 
precious, holy consolation, seem to you of any worth, 
as his minister I would humbly help to bring them 
to your mind, and make them welcome and effectual ; 
or where this may not or need not be, I would at least 
offer the cordial sympathy of a friend. 



Introductory II 357 



When your children are growing up, and passing 
through the period when impressions of all kinds are 
readily received and take permanent effect, if then, in 
any degree, however humble, I can help to awaken or 
strengthen any in behalf of piety and virtue, I ask to 
be permitted to do so. If any child can be attached 
to religion through the person of its minister, and 
thus be led in the paths of purity and uprightness, 
and be made good and happy in himself and a bless- 
ing to you, I ask the parents' leave to cooperate with 
them to that end. 

To these and kindred duties I desire to devote 
myself, yet I foresee something of the obstacles that 
oppose their full performance. In a society so large 
as this, and in times and circumstances that require 
such constant application to the various labors of the 
study, it is necessary to forego much of the satisfac- 
tion which the private duties of the ministry would, in 
some other cases, afford. In a society of two hun- 
dred families one's whole time would scarcely make 
him an intimate acquaintance with all, and in this 
region and this age how small a portion of time is 
he permitted to spare for this purpose ! 

There are other obstacles in the way of all the du- 
ties of the profession that cannot be forgotten, though 
they are not to be complained of. They arise from 
the infinitely sublime nature of religion and the im- 
perfect nature of man. If the ministry of this religion 
could- be given to an angel, whose being was pure in- 
telligence and love holy and unbounded, how would 
its deep power be put forth and felt ; how would its 
sublimities and beauties be sent in upon our souls ; 
how would heaven be unveiled and the Father re- 
vealed, the Son believed in and loved ; how would 
our sins be forsaken, our sorrows soothed, our joys 



358 Appendix. 



made pure, our affection set on heaven. How would 
our religion possess our souls and win them to her 
own ways and lead them by the still waters and the 
green pastures of the heavenly city. But this may 
not be. Infinite wisdom and love has otherwise or- 
dained it. The infinite interests of eternity are com- 
mitted to the ministry of erring lips and selfish hearts 
and feeble hands. Its truths and motives, its warn- 
ings and comforts, must pass through the darkened 
understandings of man. Man, the creature of yes- 
terday, an instrument of clay, is set to win and to fit 
souls for a spiritual and eternal world, to which the 
teacher and the taught are alike travelers and alike 
need help and light. Who is sufficient for these 
things ? Surely man cannot do them. Man, in his 
inexperience, feebleness, blindness, does not accom- 
plish this great work of God. No, the Spirit of God 
is moving abroad upon the earth. Grace -doth the 
work. He sendeth his angels in the events of his 
providence. He sendeth them in his judgments and 
his mercies, and these are the ministers of God and 
religion, — angels do minister to inen. Man is but a 
feeble intrument, an humble fellow-worker in the 
cause which Heaven hath not forsaken, nor will for- 
sake, — the cause of man's eternal happiness. 

Brethren, I would enter upon the station which 
you have assigned to me amongst you with humility 
and yet with courage, diffident but not faint-hearted, 
with a just sense of the danger of this new, untried 
test, but without shrinking from it, looking for your 
candid, generous, judicious indulgence, without ex- 
pecting or relying on any adventitious, groundless, 
unmerited partiality. Some anxious, doubting fears 
must always cast their shade upon the perilous and 
unfathomable future. And it is right and desirable 



Introductory II. 



359 



that it should be so. But notwithstanding the un- 
certainties and dangers of the coming future, I will 
enter upon it with joy and confidence and trust in 
God. I will believe and trust in its promises. I will 
look upon its brightness, and not strain my vision to 
discern its dark spots. The wise will say, " It is a 
dreamy romance ; the world will disappoint you ; your 
calling is a thankless one ; your efforts will very often 
be fruitless, your expectations vain, your friends faith- 
less." Be it so. When experience comes and teaches 
these lessons, let them be listened to with docility, 
and acted upon ; but at present I believe it is better 
to be disappointed in some things than distrustful of 
all. It is better to be sometimes deceived than al- 
ways suspicious. 

The cheerful confidence with which I assume a 
share of the responsibilities of this office among you 
is heightened by circumstances which I may not now 
dwell upon. There is harmony of religious faith and 
feeling ; there is good order, well and long estab- 
lished ; there is the work begun and long continued ; 
there are ways of duty marked out and long and well 
followed, tried and proved ; there is counsel ; there is 
help. To him who has sought and kindly welcomed 
a fellow-laborer in the vineyard which God hath in- 
trusted to him, to him I would repeat the scriptural 
pledge of faithfulness, if Heaven doth bestow and 
continue its blessing : " Thy people shall be my peo- 
ple, and thy God my God ; where thou diest I will 
die, and there will I be buried." 

Brethren, let us continually unite our prayers and 
endeavors, that the work of the Lord may revive and 
flourish in the midst of us. Let the spirit of pure 
religion abide in and fill our homes and our individual 
hearts. And if the gospel of Christianity, through 



360 



Appendix. 



the feeble agency of my ministry, shall bring one 
wanderer back to God, bind up one broken spirit, 
pour light and peace into one desponding bosom, 
attach one little child to things lovely and excellent, 
then if a consciousness of faithfulness be here, I shall 
cease from my labors and lie down in my grave, be it 
an early or a late one, with submission and peace. 



III. 



ORDAINING ADDRESS. 



'HE last ordination service in this church was 



1 in 1830. It occurred on a week-day, and occu- 
pied the entire day. There was a procession, with a 
band of music, an array of marshals and ushers, and 
a dinner or banquet at the close. A numerous coun- 
cil was organized of ministers and lay delegates from 
churches far and near. The council examined the 
testimonials of the candidate, and passed judgment 
on his fitness. Some eight or ten of its members 
were appointed by the body to take the several parts 
of the services. Of these two still survive, Drs. 
Dewey and Newell. If the council had not been 
satisfied with the candidate there would have been 
no ordination, unless the church or parish had taken 
the matter into their own hands, as they had a perfect 
right to do, according to the law and usage in Con- 
gregational churches. The council, however, made 
no difficulties. 

This elaborate method of ordination was almost 
universal in those days, and is still widely preva- 
lent, with various modifications and curtailments, 
according to the convenience or the taste of the 
churches. 

Another method of ordination — one much ob- 
served in the early periods of New England history, 
and never wholly discontinued — is that by which each 




362 Appendix. 



church ordains its own minister by its own officers, or 
by one or more of its own members deputed for that 
duty, the minister-elect usually or frequently preach- 
ing the sermon. This method goes upon the theory, 
stoutly maintained by early Congregational writers, 
that ordination in its essence consists in the election 
of the minister and his acceptance, and that the or- 
daining service, so called, is only a public and solemn 
recognition of an accomplished fact. 

This latter method, recommended by its primitive 
character and greater simplicity, has been adopted for 
the present occasion, and the parish authorities have 
authorized me to ordain my associate in their behalf, 
with the assistance of our friend from the univer- 
sity, who kindly gives us his countenance and his 
prayers. 

By the authority of this church and society, and 
in their name and behalf, I ordain you, John Gra- 
ham Brooks, to the work of the Christian ministry 
amongst us. We lay upon you the burdens and in- 
vest you with the privileges of the pastoral office. 
We assign to you the appropriate functions of- a min- 
ister, at the baptismal font, in marriage rites, at the 
bier of the dead, and at the mourner's side. We 
place you at the commemorative table below. We 
commit the religious instruction of the young in the 
Sunday-school to your direction. We put you in 
possession of this pulpit for the free utterance and 
enforcement of the true and the right and the good, 
as the Spirit of God and your own diligent study 
shall reveal them to you. 

You come as an associate minister. In that rela- 
tionship I trust you will find nothing to hamper or 
hinder you, but rather, for a time, longer or shorter, 
as Providence shall order, something for your assist- 



Ordaining Address. 



363 



ance and relief. I will endeavor to be your helper, 
or, if you prefer to put it so, you shall be mine. At 
any rate, however we put it, there must be between 
you and me no clashing of aims or methods, and 
no separate or rival interests in anything that con- 
cerns the prosperity, harmony, and edification of this 
people. 

We will not insult your manhood by pretending to 
ordain you to a life of repose on a bed of roses, or of 
lounging in the easy- chair of dignified leisure or grace- 
ful self-indulgence. You would justly scorn the posi- 
tion, if it were that, and despise yourself for accepting 
it. The best, the most alluring and animating thing 
we have to offer you is a fair field to work in ; not a 
finished garden all rolled and swarded for dainty feet ; 
not ripened fruit to be idly plucked, and ready to melt 
in your mouth ; but a field, like the rest of the world, 
hard and rough, with stony places in it, and choking 
thorns sprouting or already grown here and there ; 
a field to be tilled and mellowed and planted by the 
hardest toil, demanding all the work you can put upon 
it. 

We do the best we can for you here in opening to 
you the opportunity for the strenuous action of all 
your faculties. The whole world could offer you 
none larger or better. And I need not remind you 
that if you shall do your best and utmost it will be 
none too much or too good for the position. And 
when your people, in their grateful and perhaps ad- 
miring appreciation, shall tell you how well you have 
done, while you will be touched with a sense of their 
indulgence, and cheered by a glimpse of success, 
it will make you feel how much better it might and 
ought to have been done, how far short of your ideal 
and your opportunity you have come ; and it will 



364 



Appendix. 



send you to your closet to think in deep but healthful 
humility how you shall gird up your loins for more 
earnest exertion and a more deserved success. 

I trust there is nothing in what I am saying to 
alarm or depress you. On the contrary, as far as it 
goes, it ought to stimulate and encourage you. Do 
not be afraid of what is before you. Only to a weak 
and indolent man can it be alarming ; not in the least 
to a resolute and earnest one. 

You will find blessed furtherances and sweet en- 
couragements at every step you take. You will find 
this people ready to take you at your best, and to do 
full justice, perhaps more than justice, to every good 
endeavor. They will make liberal allowances for you 

— all that you need at the outset. They will consider 
your youth, if I may judge of them by what their 
fathers and predecessors did in like circumstances. 
They will not demand of you at once all that wisdom 
which only the experience of life can bring, or all the 
weigh tiness which only the accumulating years can 
bestow. They will expect, and ought, that you will 
give to them, and to your work among them, not the 
driblets of your time, nor the dregs of a mind already 
fatigued by outside labors and the care of the uni- 
verse at large, but the best hours of your best days, 
and the freshness and vigor of your unexhausted 
powers. They will think, as I am sure you will 
think, that the best contribution you can make to 
the interests of truth and humanity at large is work 
well done and diligently in this your special sphere, 

— a limited sphere, and yet in a sense how illimit- 
able ! 

Your people will expect to see in you at once the 
signs of promise, of growth and strong endeavor ; 
but for the ripened fruit they will patiently wait, 



Ordai7iing Address. 365 



knowing, as we all know, that the best things, the 
things really worth having, always have to be waited 
for like the full corn in the ear. The puny mush- 
room, that a baby's hand can crush, attains its feeble 
perfection in a Tew hours ; while the oak, of which 
navies are built, requires scores of years for its 
growth, and is the stronger for the suns and storms 
of centuries. 

Meanwhile they will from the first and always give 
you a candid and appreciative listening. In your pre- 
sentment of divine things they will agree with you 
when they can ; and when they cannot they will do 
the next best thing, and pay the next best compli- 
ment — that of differing from you ; and in either case 
they will be set a-thinking, maintaining their own in- 
dependence and respecting yours, and grateful always 
to the man who makes them think on the great sub- 
jects. Their homes and hearts, and often their most 
sacred confidences, will be open to you. For any 
touch of sympathy you give them, in word or act, they 
will give you back tenfold. 

In the sacred Sabbath hours they will receive with 
eagerness any the least light you may throw upon the 
problems of life, the counsels of God, and the riches 
of Christ. Any sentiment, lofty or tender, you shall 
utter here from a full heart and living conviction, will 
spread through all their hearts with a sweet contagion 
that they could not resist if they would, and would not 
if they could. 

Any thought or word or tone of yours that shall 
pierce through the crust of selfishness and worldli- 
ness, which they know so well is always gathering 
stealthily about their consciences and hearts, and 
shall awaken them to generous aspirings and intents, 
and a sense of the sacredness of duty, and the 



366 Appendix. 



weal thine ss' of love, and the sweetness of charity, and 
the beauty of holiness, — they will welcome it as the 
Arctic voyager welcomes the returning sun, as the 
fields of August welcome the reviving dews. And 
whenever on the strong pinions of vital, fervent 
prayer, such as goes down to the very issues of all 
lives, you shall be able to lift them above themselves 
and away from their idols, lift yourself and them up 
into the realm of the eternal verities, up to the gates 
of heaven, up to the mercy-seat of God, and into the 
bosom of the Heavenly Father, they will feel it, — 
aye, the hardest and the coldest of them will feel it, — 
as a supreme benefaction, which they will gratefully 
remember, and perhaps the very hour of it and the 
place of it, as long as they live. What more or better 
would you have ? With such opportunities and pos- 
sibilities before you, you cannot be faint-hearted,, but 
only brave and hopeful. 

I might use the occasion for giving unlimited prac- 
tical advice. But private occasions will serve better 
for that. I think it would be unseasonable and im- 
pertinent now. For it must be that at this solemn 
crisis of your life, at this initial point of your chosen 
career, — this new point of departure, for which all 
your previous years have been a. preparation, and to 
which all your coming ones will be the sequel, — it 
must be in such an hour that your soul, all astir and 
aglow with the inspirations of God, is listening to 
wiser and holier counsels than can be written or 
spoken in earthly language. Now, if ever, the great 
aspirations from which all good things in man do 
proceed must be kindling, swelling, mounting within 
you; and those high resolves which determine life 
and character to noble ends are taking fixed shape 
and hardening into adamant. Now there comes to 



Ordaining Address. 



367 



you, breathed into your inner ear, the Saviour's ten- 
der and pleading question to another, with its attend- 
ant commandment : " Simon Peter, lovest thou me ? " 
And to your inner and uplifted eye there appears, as 
it were, the prophet's roll, unfolding out of heaven, 
and written over, within and without, with soft ap- 
peals and solemn injunctions to a consecrated life and 
a faithful ministry. If it be so with you, that is true 
anointing and the effective ordination ; and all else, 
all we can say or do, is empty form and convention- 
ality. While the living God is thus by his great in- 
spirations teaching you at first hand, any poor saws 
and maxims of ours would be but a superfluity and 
an interruption. While the Holy Spirit is dealing 
with you, a mortal man had best be silent. 

I beg you, in conclusion, to accept my cordial as- 
surances of welcome and congratulation. 

Let us join hands for one moment in pledge of fel- 
lowship and brotherhood, of mutual sympathy and 
helpful and single-hearted cooperation. 

And let me add my best wishes for the realization 
of the . bright prospects of this hour. And let my 
good wishes reach beyond the purple and gold of an 
aspiring and hopeful youth-time, and beyond even 
the prosperities and successes of manhood's strong 
maturity. Let them stretch on to a period which you 
are not likely to be thinking of, but which I may well 
have in mind, — the far distant period when all these 
elders of the congregation, who are receiving you to- 
day with such parental cordiality, have become to you 
but a far-off, albeit an ever vivid and tender remem- 
brance ; when the strong men who gather round you 
now shall all have passed down the vale and out of 
sight ; when even of your coevals but here and there 
one will remain, and their children and their chil- 



368 



Appendix. 



dren's children shall constitute your flock ; and when 
time, the all-subduer, with a heavy yet not unkindly 
hand, shall have laid its weight of infirmities on your- 
self; when the almond-tree shall flourish and the 
grasshopper shall be a burden ; when limbs and lips 
shall falter ; when even these pulpit stairs, that you 
could clear at a bound to-day, shall have become a 
weariness to your feet, and your voice, resonant now 
with the glorious vigor of youth, shall labor to reach 
yonder walls with its feeble tones, — when that day 
comes, and long and late be its coming to you, then 
may the good God grant you those beautiful and 
ample compensations which He knows so well how 
to provide. May He surround you with troops of 
loyal, life-long friends, cushion you about with sym- 
pathies and kindnesses and grateful memories, lap 
you softly amid the tender endearments of close and 
home-bound relationships, and make you even then a 
welcome and cherished presence in large circles of 
affection and pleasant companionship. May He make 
the twilight of your life as soft and tranquil, if not so 
bright, as its radiant noon. May He, as He surely 
can, make your last days your best days, and the end 
better than the beginning. This is my prayer for 
you. Your honored teacher at your side prays it with 
me, and all the people — my people, your people — 
are saying in their hearts, Amen. 



